The fundamental reason so many markets are not free, and so dysfunctional, is that the voters of our democracy don't really want freedom. Freedom will come when we want it, when we insist on it, when the average voter sees a free market solution rather than endless controls as the answer to real world problems. The sad paradox of free markets is that free markets do not need people to understand them to work. But democracy does require voters to understand how things work.
--John Cochrane, The hard road of free markets