Are We Having Fun Yet?

Reviewing John Cassidy's How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities, Robert Solow asks and (more or less) answers a question:

Why, in the marketplace (sic!) of ideas, have the evangelists for the unrestricted market attracted so much attention and the “realists” so little? He argues, fairly convincingly, that the truth does not lie predominantly on that side of the issue. So is it that believers always make more effective advocates than skeptics do? Are we for some reason more receptive to simple answers than to complex ones? Is it that, in the nature of the case, there is more money backing one side than the other?

It isn't clear whether Solow is embracing these answers or just flirting with them, but I will embrace them: he is exactly right. "Pure" libertarianism* is always an more dramatic and more elegant and therefore an easier sell than the slow boring of the slowly boring. In this respect, ironically, the inheritors are the intellectual inheritors of the radical socialists. Socialists used to compare an actual free market with a hypothetical socialist nirvana. Libertarians like to compare an actual messy market with a hypothetical self-executing dynamo. Wonky, mainstream liberals and market realists actually like being boring. But it's not a program that wins elections.
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*Actually, there is no such thing as pure libertarianism, but leave that for another day (and anyway, the explanation is probably boring).