Rasmussen: 75% Say Free Markets Better Than Government Management of Economy, Political Class (Shockingly) Disagrees

posted by Nima

August 4, 2010 · Posted in General Economics

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 75% of Likely Voters prefer free markets over a government managed economy. Just 14% think a government managed economy is better while 11% are not sure. These figures have changed little since December.

Polling released earlier this week showed that Americans overwhelmingly believe that more competition and less regulation is better for the economy than more regulation and less competition.

Not surprisingly, America’s Political Class is far less enamored with the virtues of a free market. In fact, Political Class voters narrowly prefer a government managed economy over free markets by a 44% to 37% margin. However, among Mainstream voters, 90% prefer the free market.

Outside of the Political Class, free markets are preferred across all demographic and partisan lines. This gap may be one reason that 68% of voters believe the Political Class doesn’t care what most Americans think. Fifty-nine percent (59%) are embarrassed by the behavior of the Political Class.

Is this an indication for people waking up to the alternative of voluntaryism?

Probably not quite yet.

The notion that the free market is better at “managing the economy” is a pretty obvious fact, and one that at this point you would have to have been blindfolded in a darkroom with a feeding tube (or alternatively dragged into public school) for the past 10 years in order not to get it.

It’s also merely an argument from effect. Voluntaryism will only spread once enough people get the argument from morality. And that, as we all know, will be a multi-generational effort.