What are basic economic principles?

Whenever someone says that all policy problems can be solved by markets, they appeal to something they call "basic economic principles."

If one goes to the open course page for the intermediate micro course offered at MIT, one finds the following topics on the syllabus:

Consumer Theory
2	Choice, Preferences, Utility
3	Demand, Revealed Preferences, Comparative Statics
4	Consumer Surplus, Aggregation
5	Variations to the Basic Choice Model (Time, Uncertainty)
Producer Theory
6	Technology, Profit Maximization, Cost Minimization
7	Supply, Aggregation
Markets
8	Monopoly
9	Oligopoly and Game Theory
10	Walrasian Equilibrium
Market Failures
11	Externalities
12	Public Goods
13	Small Number of Agents, Nash Bargaining
Asymmetric Information
14	Adverse Selection, Moral Hazard, Principal-Agent Model
15	Auction Design
16	Voting and Other Applications

Six out of fifteen of topics (8-9, 11-14) are about ways the market can produce suboptimal outcomes.  These topics are not esoteric any more (they are showing up in intermediate courses), and they have rigorous economic theory behind them.  It was time we stopped using the phrase "basic economics" to refer to idealized market conditions that often do not exist.