In 2009 the worst recession since the Great Depression hit the world, and it hit the U.S. particularly hard. We’ve had a long, slow climb off of the bottom but we still have a long way to go before our economy would be considered strong. I think a lot of Americans realize that we will never be as we were before. Perhaps that’s why The Economist found that American support for capitalism has dropped 20% in the last 2 years.
RISING debt and lost output are the common measures of the cost of the financial crisis. But a new global opinion poll shows another, perhaps more serious form of damage: falling public support for capitalism. This is most marked in the country that used to epitomise free enterprise. In 2002, 80% of Americans agreed that the world’s best bet was the free-market system. By 2010 that support had fallen to 59%, only a little above the 54% average for the 25 countries polled. Nominally Communist China is now one of the world’s strongest supporters of capitalism, at 68%, up from 66% in 2002. Brazil scores 68% too. Germany squeaks into top place with 69%.
Perhaps there is some political peril for a party to sell the “free market” as the only arbiter for public policy. The Republican party has told us that the free market demands we all take lower wages, poorer benefits and higher unemployment for competition’s sake. The GOP has also told us that any attempts to regulate attempts to screw us (like selling us houses we can’t afford with mortgages we can’t understand) will hurt the free market, so it mustn’t be done.