A Decent Comment About Economics

I was reading about a particularly egregious abuse of statistics and followed a thread to here, which had an interesting comment:

I know a guy in my dorm, a pro-PATRIOT Act "classical liberal" who used to want to be an economics major. He was turned off by the fact that it involved a bunch of min/maxing, rather than waxing on eloquently about the perfection and beauty of the free market. And really, who doesn't get sick, on occasion, of undergrad econ courses with their endless Lagrangian multipliers and simple partial derivatives? I think what angered him more, though, was that it treats economics as an empirically falsifiable science (Not well, some might claim (is John Emerson around?), with perhaps excessively high standards for falsification of favored models, but at least in theory). This guy didn't want there to be any chinks in the armor of the free market. To him, this isn't an empirical issue at all: it's a moral one. I respect that, actually, but the problem is when these people demand that economics the empirical social science meet free market libertarianism the moral position. When the two clash, the strategy is to take "the free market is perfect" as a null hypothesis, and then set a standard for falsification above whatever evidence supports an alternative hypothesis.

Two comments:
1) I've had this particular conversation.
2) Lagrangian multipliers huh? I may have underestimated parts of modern economics.