Vietnam Shocker from Cato's Dan Mitchell

Cato Institute Senior Fellow, Dan Mitchell

You will not believe what you are about to read on how countries around the world think about free markets. Really quite astounding! Read Cato Institute Senior Fellow Dan Mitchell’s full review here:

Every so often, I share polling data from other nations that is either encouraging or puzzling. Looking through the archives, here are some memorable examples.

*Americans are more libertarian than Europeans.

*On the other hand, the French support spending cuts by a 4-1 margin.

*More than 90 percent of Greeks and Italians see government as an obstacle to business.

*Nearly 70 percent of Labor voters in the United Kingdom would favor class-warfare tax policy even if tax revenues didn’t increase.

*People in 20 out of 21 nations preferred Obama over Romney.

*Italians supposedly are more fiscally conservative than Americans. As are Germans.

*But Americans are more likely than anybody else to think there is too much red tape.

Some of those results make sense, while others were a big surprise.

But nothing was as surprising as the results we’re looking at today.

First, some background. According to Wikipedia, Vietnam “is one of the world’s four remaining single-party socialist states officially espousing communism.”

Yet according to a global public opinion survey from Pew Research, citizens of that communist nation are the world’s most pro-capitalist people. Asked to agree or disagree with the statement that people are better off in a free market economy, 95 percent of them chose capitalism.