There are Republican voters who like Bernie and they have been showing up to his rallies for years.

Then Bernie should have run for the Republican nomination. He tried running for the Democrat nomination twice, and he lost twice.

I’ve felt that Bernie should be president since 2015, but he never stood a chance in the US. You have a 0% chance of being elected president in this country once the label of “socialist” has been applied to you.

It’s true, the range of ideological possibilities has been intentionally limited, here in the US. As Noam Chomsky said:

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.

The paper that coined the term free market specifically referred to them as “well regulated”. From the very beginning it was recognized that a functioning market requires government regulation, if for nothing else at least for contract enforcement and dispute resolution.

Many free market evangelists would agree that some state is likely necessary, to, as you point out, enforce contracts and mediate dispute resolution, as well as enforce private property rights. However, whether they would admit it or not, they only want said state to work for them, but never against them. They want all the protections that a state might offer, but none of the restrictions. They want laws that protect them but never bind them.

I’m not sure what measurement they would use to justify their position, or if they would try to justify it at all. I suppose that’s what makes them evangelists: belief is the basis of their conviction.

Not enough people listen to Joseph Stiglitz. Even many economists don’t listen to Stiglitz. That’s the thing about economics: it’s more philosophy than science, and like philosophy there are different schools of thought. If an economist doesn’t like what Stiglitz has to say, that economist can just choose to listen to someone from a different school within economics.

For instance, Stiglitz has been quite critical of what he calls “free market evangelism,” the popular idea that free markets are the most efficient method for distributing scarce resources, and so there should be minimal interference with markets from “outside” entities like the state. Economists like Stiglitz have pointed out that markets are not as efficient as the evangelists believe, but, obviously, they don’t listen.

This is a coup

Yeah, we know.