My guess is because the culture generating media outlets benefit greatly from the free market.

People hate communism for good reason.  Look at the mess it made of the USSR.  Russia is on its way to becoming a third-world country.

An economy is all about productivity. The most productive economic system is laissez-faire capitalism because it allows for competition between businesses which should lead to lower prices and higher quality products. When the government starts putting too many restrictions on what businesses can do, they don't make a profit and they go out of businesses. I do not support pure laissez-faire capitalism because businesses need some limits on what they can do. (no child labor, no exceedingly dangerous working conditions, no direct attacks on other businesses to stop competition, minimum wages within reason).

Socialism is a very complex economic theory, especially when compared to free market capitalism. Almost no one understand every form of socialism. In some versions, the government owns the means of production, in others the factory workers own the factors (closer to communism). The problem with giving the government too much power in your life is that you can't predict what they will do with it ten years from now, much less fifty years from now. The weak link in communism is selfishness. People will always be selfish, and the system that caters to selfishness is capitalism.

inb4 Ayn Rand fanboys and angsty teen anarchists

Governments hated communism before the cold war. Hitler hated communism.

I thought the US fixation with free market ideals is also part of its self proclaimed identity, the part of the "land of the free", the place where somebody with nothing can "make it rich" and its the "American dream" for everyone to have equal  opportunity to get rich (but in reality this is clearly not true, but is supported by claims such as "If you work hard in America you will be rewarded and thus we all have equal opportunity").

Wintersong's kinda correct. You can see part of your answer in the difference between our Declaration of Independence's foundation on "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" and our Constitution's goal of establishing central authority to provide security, encourage interstate commerce, and stave off a public debt crisis. Revolutionary ideals yielded pretty quickly to crass material concerns.

But on particular business of how badly we in the US tend to misuse the English word "socialism," Cold War rhetoric and propaganda are the bigger problem. Because both our dysfunctional parties found it useful to demonize the USSR rather than attempt a constructive engagement based on consistently attacking Stalin's internal human rights violations, most of us need to be nearly finished with a decent college education before we learn that socialism and communism are not two names for the same thing. Even fewer of us know that the world has never seen a proper communist state because every last pig of a leader who's taken up the banner has gone down the path of Stalin and Mao, namely murderous nationalism cloaked in Marxist terminology.

Not to quibble too much, but a market isn't 'free' if it is coercively monopolized.  'Free market' doesn't necessarily mean 'totally unregulated market'.

You are quite confused.  Let me see if I can help you.

One of your problems is the assumption that there is a free market in the USA.  There isn't.  Never has been.  Never will be.

"Free market" is a code phrase for "whatever is good for big business and the super-rich."  It is a managed market - managed by those entities, for the good of those entities.  Period.  Make no mistake - the last thing big business and the super-rich want is an actual "free market."  "Free market" to them means a market managed or manipulated to assure the maximum amount of profits to them.  Often that means an unfree market to YOU, the citizen or consumer, which is exactly what they want.  A free market would have let all the big banks fail, as well as General Motors and the other car companies.  A republican - George Bush (supposedly "anti-socialist pro-free market") - bailed all these big businesses out with trillions of taxpayer dollars, because the big businessses ordered him to do so.  Obama - a democrat - took it a step further when he got into office.

As far as heath care goes, the reason big business (i.e. "the free market") opposes socialized health care is because big business created and profits from the current system.  Big business is the "vested interest" in the equaltion (the health insurance companies, the pharmaceutical companies, etc).  Why would they want to kill their golden goose?

Why do some American people froth at the mouth at socialism?  Because there are two "football teams" in America.  One football team is the democrats, with their fans all screaming and hollering on their side.  The other team is the republicans, with their fans all screaming and hollering on their side.  The republican team is the side that will chant the anti-socialist slogans, because they, just like their counterparts on the other side, will chant whatever their puppet masters want them to chant.  It's one of their empty slogans.  The funny thing is, republican rule is just as "socialist" as democrat rule (George Bush bailed out big Wall Street banks with trillions of dollars - not much of a "free market" as you see, but the big banks were all for it) but they don't complain when republicans engage in socialism, which they always do. Another of their empty slogans is "no nation building!" chanted quite a lot when Bill Clinton was in office.  This empty slogan was quickly forgotten when George Bush entered the Oval Office, as he was the biggest nation builder of all time.  Both sides have lots of empty slogans.  They don't mean anything.

Obama had no intentions of changing the health care system, as you suggest.  Obama is controlled by the same big business and super-rich who control all politicians in the USA.  The goal was to pretend to change something, while changing nothing.  This is why the pharmaceutical and health insurance companies were actually allowed to write the legislation!  That's right - the people who were going to be "regulated" in the "new system" were the people writing the new regulations, which is why you got one new regulation on the American citizen stating that he would be REQUIRED BY LAW to purchase health insurance, and would be fined if he didn't (Yay!  Free new customers for the health insurance industry!  Does this sound like a free market to you?).  Yes, the industry was saying "Please don't throw us in the briar patch!" which is exactly where they wanted to be thrown.  Or, actually, they didn't care either way.  If the current system was kept (which looks likely), they would be happy with that.  If we moved to the new system which they created by writing the legislation, they would be happy with that too.  Heads, they win.  Tails, you lose.

That concludes the lesson for today.  I hope you learned something.

Funny, I just read this article AFTER writing what I wrote above.  He says what I said, but he says it better.  This guy knows what's up.

http://www.counterpunch.com/roberts01222010.html

The thing is america's market isn't a free market like most americans think it is. It is a mixed, but most people view it as free because many simply only know what the government tells them about other styles of marketing.

No, I am not qualified, hence why I said I think. You are not qualified to speak of Obama's intentions either, yet you state that he has no intention of changing the health care system, without any further qualification.

You may have indeed "answered" his question, but he requested an explanation "without getting political". Your entire last paragraph has next to nothing to do with free market or socialism directly. Further, you are the first one to mention political parties, and this rarely moves conversation in a good direction.

what do you know that other people haven't told you?

Also, from what i think  i know, America allows for innovation and better products to overcome larger companies

i.e. Google, there used to be three almost equally divided search engines, now not nearly so much

ya, I never said otherwise. I was just pointing out that well most of our knowledge comes from what other's have told us... I mean how do you know your abc's?

Characters used in the english language to form words.

Edit: usually learned as abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz in that order in a song