This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, October 17, 2011. I'm Caleb Brown.

Public opinion matters in the fight over taxes and spending and the role of government.

At Cato Club 200, Polster Scott Rasmussen gave a frank assessment on how Americans think about

free markets.

This is a portion of his remarks.

We did a poll and we asked people what's better?

Capitalism or socialism.

53% picked capitalism. Among people under 30, one third picked capitalism, one third

picked capitalism, one third socialism, and one third said hey we're under 30,

doesn't matter. More took that to say, wow this is a great talking point, I'm going to put it in a

movie, capitalism is on its dying days. We went and explored with some more polling and one of the things that we found was that 78% of Americans,

8 out of 10 people said they preferred a free market economy over a government managed economy.

So I explained this to a friend of mine who's an economist and he said, well that shows how stupid the American people are.

They don't understand they're the same thing, but what it really showed was that my friend didn't understand public opinion.

When Americans today think of capitalism, what they think of is a system where big companies can keep the money when times are good and they get bailed out when times are bad.

They think of regulators who make decisions and then walk through a revolving door and get a contract.

They think it's a corrupt system of crony capitalism.

And we can argue all we want about that's not really fair,

that's not what capitalism is, but the fight over that wording is already lost capitalism in many minds has become a problem

Free markets competition very well received

In fact on any issue if we ask about a bank or an industry or a

company and say what's better in terms of helping keep cost under control

...