Be ready for a surprise:

This year, 84% of Chinese citizens polled agreed the free market is best. That was the highest approval rating among all countries polled. China. (...) India, too, long a bastion of Third-Way economic planning and regulation, gave the free market a 79% approval rating.

The market has fans everywhere in the emerging economic superpowers: In Brazil, 75% of those polled expressed their approval; in Nigeria, 82% (where all those oilspills are, Ivan). (...) (T)he highest approval rating ever, 96% in 2002, was recorded by Vietnam, i.e., what we used to think of as Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam but maybe should be rethought of as Adam Smith’s Vietnam (even if 96% is the kind of majority Ho Chi Minh elections used to produce). In the Palestinian territories, the free market polls a vigorous 82%. (...)

(...)

It seems there’s also strong popular support for international trade. Growing trade and economic ties with other countries get 93% approval in China, 90% in India, 87% in Brazil, 84% in Britian, Poland and Nigeria, and so on. (...)

In the United States, worryingly, support for trade is only 66%, which puts that country between Egypt and Mexico in terms of openness to the world. That score is up from a disastrous 53% in 2008. Even so, for the first few decades after the Second World War, the United States was the main engine for worldwide trade liberalization. (...)

Here are the results.

He wrote:

In many ways it is misleading to speak of "capitalism" as though this had been a new and altogether different system which suddenly came into being toward the end of the eighteenth century; we use this term here because it is the most familiar name, but only with great reluctance, since with its modern connotations it is itself largely a creation of that socialist interpretation of economic history with which we are concerned.

And democracy versus the market: 

When the state, in the name of “the people,” holds exclusive property rights -- a monopoly! -- over those scarce resources, people will be at the mercy of the state officials.  The state officials will now hold ultimate responsibility for what is produced, how things are produced, and for whom things are produced.  It doesn’t matter whether they’re Soviets, North Koreans, or Latin American military dictatorships.  It doesn’t matter what language they speak, what culture they’ve emerged from, what race or gender the individuals themselves may be. In the name of “the people,” the state officials must decide, for example, which authors, which ideas, which books, which magazines and newspapers, are “socially worthy” of production and distribution, and which should not be produced.

In a market system these decisions are given to anybody who owns the means of production – and those private owners of the means of production will stay in control of the means of production only if they serve the demands of consumers. Only in a market system do we see millions of bibles being produced and purchased as well as hundreds of thousands of books that criticize religion and perhaps support atheism.  Privately-owned publishers in the U.S. produce both books on the free market economy and Marx’s own radical books that attack the whole idea of our market and political institutions, as well as all views in between! 

These decisions are not left up to some government bureau. They are not placed on some “democratic” political ballet for “society” to decide what should be produced.  Instead, individuals cast their “dollar votes,” purchasing among an array of goods and services as each sees best fit.  Joseph Schumpeter, an Austrian economist, once emphasized that, in a very practical sense, the market system is more “democratic” than a political system:  cast your vote for a president, and you might or might not get what you voted for.  You get only what the majority had voted for.  But spend your dollar on a good or service, and you do get what you asked for.  The majority of citizens out there probably detest, for example, old fashioned “jug band” music.  But it is nevertheless produced on compact disk – and thereby enjoyed by what is obviously a minority of citizens – because some have found a way to serve that minority profitably.  This would not occur if the decision to produce jug band music was left up to a democratic vote in a political process.  There, the majority view wins. When the means of production are privately owned, producers will be encouraged to produce whatever they believe will be profitable to produce, seeking the “dollar votes” of consumers. Such freedoms allow not only for an enormous array of physical goods and services, reflecting all kinds of common and uncommon and even outright strange tastes and preferences, they also allow for the possibility of a civil sphere with different ideas, viewpoints, stances on religious and cultural matters, debates, websites, blogs, and so on to flourish.

Liberalism versus tribalism:

One of the great tenets of liberalism -- the true sort of liberalism, not the dirigiste ignorance that today, in English-speaking countries, flatters itself unjustifiably with that term -- is that no human being is less worthy just because he or she is outside of a particular group.  Any randomly chosen stranger from Cairo or Cancun has as much claim on my sympathies and my respect and my regard as does any randomly chosen person from Charlottesville or Chicago.

Liberalism recognizes that people are part of families and friendships and a variety of different kinds of associations.  Liberals encourage, or at least tolerate, any and all forms of voluntary associations, from marital ones to religious ones to trading ones.  Liberals reject the romantic nonsense that demands that each person "love" or "care for" everyone in the same way that that person loves and cares for himself, his family, and his friends.

But liberalism rejects the notion that there is anything much special or compelling about political relationships.  It is tribalistic, atavistic, to regard those who look more like you to be more worthy of your regard than are those who look less like you.  It is tribalistic, atavistic, to regard those who speak your native tongue to be more worthy of your affection and concern than are those whose native tongues differ from yours.

For the true liberal, the human race is the human race.  The struggle is to cast off as much as possible primitive sentiments about "us" being different from "them."

The liberal is fully aware that such sentiments are rooted in humans’ evolved psychology, and so are not easily cast off.  But the liberal does his or her best to rise above those atavistic sentiments,

The liberal is also fully aware that most people will never rise above such sentiments.  But because rising above these sentiments is a value worth pursuing -- because casting off what is now the irrational feeling that a stranger who happens also to be a fellow citizen of your country is thereby a more worthy person, someone more important to you and your well-being than is a stranger who happens to be "foreign" -- the liberal points out, as occasions permit, that what matters is that people be free to associate as much as possible as they voluntarily choose without being constrained by culture or by force to associate on different terms with foreigners than with fellow citizens.

Frank Furedi:

To be sure, since the 1980s there has been a lot of talk about neo-liberalism and free market economics. But the global economy was not transformed into a deregulated paradise for ruthless profiteers. Yes, deregulation was widely acclaimed, but its implementation was confined to the banking and financial sectors. Nor was the massive expansion of credit in the late twentieth century the direct and spontaneous outcome of the workings of the free market. The American and British housing bubbles were underwritten by the political intervention of the state. Governments pursued loose monetary policies to provide consumers access to cheap credit. It was the Federal Reserve, not the markets, that established a regime of low interest rates which made possible the reckless expansion of credit.

It is tempting to blame the deregulated financial markets for unleashing today’s powerful destructive global forces. Yet the deregulated financial markets did not emerge directly from the market; they were the product of political decisions and of various kinds of wheeling-and-dealing. Governments were more than happy to accommodate to the interests of the banking and finance sectors. The expansion of credit provided governments with tax revenues that could be used to support public expenditure. The recent era of easy money, of parasitically living off borrowed wealth, was as much an outcome of short-termist political opportunism as it was of greed-driven markets.

Despite the Reagan and Thatcher governments’ promotion of monetarist policies, the state continued to be a key player in the economic life of global capitalism during their rule and after it. Even before the arrival of the so-called ‘credit crunch’, state expenditure played a massive role in the economic life of Western capitalist societies. It is worth recalling that in 2007, state expenditure in Britain accounted for 44.7 per cent of gross domestic product. Even in the US, the home ground of so-called neo-liberalism, state expenditure accounted for 37.4 per cent of GDP. And it seems likely that these figures will turn out to be underestimates, as an increasing amount of public spending is ‘off balance sheet’.

It is odd that the last phase of credit-led expansion has come to be associated predominantly with the ideas of market fundamentalism and deregulation. For this is a period in which there has been a steady growth of state and bureaucratic regulation of industrial activity, scientific experimentation, technological innovation and anything that might remotely impact on the environment. The truth is: the recent phase of global economic expansion was inextricably bound up with state intervention.