The US has never been a free-market and, honestly, the vitriol that folks use when talking about socialism has just hurt efforts to apply sane regulations that would help stabilize the market.

The US still uses SSNs for everything because everyone is too afraid of government identification to pursue a more sane approach, the result is a government issued identification that is poorly designed for what it's used for and extremely insecure. The same thing happens with our economy, instead of taking sane measure to fight against the penultimate death of capitalism (the slide into oligopolies) the vitriol against any form of government intervention has placed us in a situation where heavy handed government intervention is regularly required - we're avoiding a soft form of socialism and ending up with having to intervene like a planned economy about once every decade.

I really hope this can be solved by some smart people without trying to enlist wide-spread political support since I don't think that support is ever going to materialize.