What amazes me is how a vague and intellectually bankrupt (because it is so nebulous as to be used in ways that often wind up being contradictory) term like “free markets” nevertheless gets accorded respect it does not deserve in popular discourse in the US, particularly in the media.

Well it turns out that the public is not so easily swayed. A BBC survey of 29.000 people in 27 countries found that significant majorities, even in the US, thought more regulation and reform was needed to rein in capitalism gone amok. Only 11% said it was fine as is. By contrast, 23% of the total deemed it to be “fatally flawed”: