Why don’t people like markets?
Market process are unloved for many reasons.
One of them, obviously, is that market processes are not visible. Going through our everyday tasks, we fail to notice how millions of voluntary transactions resulted in precisely these goods and services being available to us when and where we want them at a price that makes them affordable. That is of course a point that Adam Smith and others made long ago, but could be made more forcefully if we understood the limits and susceptibilities of human imagination. In a powerful essay, 19th century free-trader Frédéric Bastiat noted that the economic process comprises ‘what is seen’ and ‘what is unseen’. For instance, when a government taxes its citizens and offers a subsidy to some producers, what is seen is the money taken and the money received. What is unseen is the amount of production that would occur in the absence of such transfers.
Another plausible factor is that markets are intrinsically probabilistic and therefore marked with uncertainty. Even though it is likely that whoever makes something that others want will earn income, it is not clear who these others will be, how much they will need what you make or when you will run into them. Like other living organisms, we are loss-averse and try to minimise uncertainty. (Note, however, that market uncertainty creates a niche for market-uncertainty insurance, which itself is all the more efficient as it is driven by demand).
Finally, humans may be motivated to place their trust in processes that are (or at least seem to be) driven by agents rather than impersonal factors. This may be why there is a strong correlation between being scared of markets and being in favour of state interventions in the economy. One of the most widespread political assumptions in modern industrial societies is that “the government should do something about x”, where x can be any social or economic problem. Why do people trust the state? The state (in people's intuitions, not in actual fact) has all the trappings of an agent. It is supposed to have knowledge, memories, intentions, strategies, etc. Now it may be that people are vastly more comfortable trusting an agent to provide help or impose sanctions, than they would trust an impersonal, distributed and largely invisible process. That would be mostly a question of intuitive psychology (highly salient in our reasonings about social processes) versus population thinking (highly unintuitive, difficult to acquire and engage in without sustained effort).
Read the whole thing. All emphasis mine. It occurs to me that you can replace "markets" with "evolution" and strike many of the same chords, but with a different audience. Via Why don’t people like markets?.