Ban the word "incentivise" and stop the monetization of everything

Right from my graduate school days, I have maintained a love-hate relationship with economics and the logic of markets in every aspect of our lives.  My roommate, Avu, who was also from Tamil Nadu, was at USC pursuing a doctoral degree in marketing and was a convert to the Milton Friedman and Hayek way of reducing everything to an utilitarian framework and a bottom-line of the price one is willing to pay.  While I enjoyed the intellectual argument, and often agreed with him, I knew well that it wasn't my religion. 

In my own studies, I opted to work with a professor who was clearly way more in favor of market forces than a couple of others were.  Even to this day, I am puzzled, and profoundly thankful, that he agreed to guide me along in the doctoral process even when it was clear to him that my philosophical preferences were elsewhere.

It is not that I hate the market.  I am no rabid socialist.  I understand what a wonderful tool that is in order to achieve a certain set of outcomes.  But, the logic of supply, demand, and price has its limits, and I detest any limitless application of those into every sphere of our lives.

Not aware of my bounded admiration for the market, faculty colleagues and students erroneously conclude that I am a right-wing free market enthusiast.  Don't judge a book by its cover, they say, and I seem to have one unattractive cover :)

My political position as a Libertarian-Democrat reflects this admiration from a distance of the market and economics.

Which is why I empathize with the sentiments expressed by Michael Sandel (ht):

Today, we often confuse market reasoning for moral reasoning. We fall into thinking that economic efficiency—getting goods to those with the greatest willingness and ability to pay for them—defines the common good. But this is a mistake.

I urge students not to simply mouth the rhetoric from what they have been told about the market or the state or religion, but to instead learn and think about other interpretations as well.  And that is what Dierdre McCloskey notes, while critiquing Sandel's work:

Over the front door of the late-medieval city hall in the Dutch city of Gouda is the motto of the first modern economy, the first large society in which commerce and innovation instead of state regulation and social status were honored. It says, Audite et alteram partem—Listen even to the other side. It's good advice for a society of the bourgeoisie, and for a classroom for students of philosophy. 

I wonder if before I die I will ever settle this love-hate relationship one way or the other.  My guess is that I will carry these mixed feelings with me until the very end, which apparently happens at the eleventh hour :)