Oh definitely. We've never lived in an ideal anything ;-). Yet much of the assumptions about how capitalism will allocate resources efficiently rest on exactl

Oh definitely. We've never lived in an ideal anything ;-). Yet much of the assumptions about how capitalism will allocate resources efficiently rest on exactly the kind of properties we don't follow and are following increasingly poorly over the past decades. (Oh, I see I used the word "anymore" above. Well, that doesn't make sense, indeed). As to the ideology: I blame the cold war for that; that shifted the debate firmly towards capitalism as an article of national identity, and the "more" the better (whatever that even means). To this day it's still common to hear the response that any criticism of capitalism is akin to communism - i.e. we're still identifying ourselves with this myth, even though communism (to the extent that that mystical utopia ever existed) has been defeated. And once something is a form of patriotic self-affirmation, it's too much to expect any kind of pragmatic, reasonable tuning to take place in politics (not that that's happening in politics currently regardless of topic, but I think that's a different matter).