The official warning arrived last week. We’d seen it coming, of course, but we hadn’t paid much attention. Not in can’t-happen-here America. Not in the Teflon Nation, where the hotter things get, the more they just slide off. Not when so many people depend on the free-market economy for progress, growth, and success.

But there it was, in a press release from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press: The number of Americans who have a positive perception of capitalism now has dropped to 50 percent — down from 52 percent in 2010. Next year, if the trend continues, we’ll have turned an astonishing corner. In the nation that cultivated free enterprise, spawned entrepreneurs of every stripe, and led the world in wealth creation, capitalism will find favor with less than half the population.

That trend found support this month from our own Ethics Newsline® survey, which focused on the Occupy Wall Street movement. Asked whether the movement was “properly rooted in legitimate concerns” or “mistakenly rooted in unfounded and extreme criticisms,” 73 percent voted for the former. Three out of four, in other words, think the protesters have a point in their complaints about the unfairness of the economic system.

Now, a brief caveat about polls. Our survey drew a fairly small response (109 readers) from a sample of people who already care deeply about responsibility, fairness, honesty, compassion, and trust — hardly a random sample, and skewed toward those actively worried about the nation’s ethics. Pew, with a larger and more representative sample, asked for reactions to hot-button words rather than for perceptions of concepts. In their poll, capitalism was pitted against socialism. Would the numbers have been different if they’d asked about free enterprise rather than capitalism — or pitted capitalism against communism? We’ll never know.

Still, Pew’s 50 percent finding is sobering. Was this survey influenced by the Occupy Wall Street movement? Their researchers doubt it. They note that the two-point slide from 2010 wasn’t very dramatic. Besides, they found that 45 percent of Occupy Wall Street supports hold positive views of capitalism. So perhaps the distaste for capitalism reflected a public reaction to the Republican primaries, where four-square economic conservatives bashed Mitt Romney for being a free-market capitalist? No again: Pew’s survey was conducted in early December, prior to the most vitriolic internecine attacks.

So we’re left with a much larger question: Why is capitalism facing such a bad rap? It’s not a function of recessionary times: Free enterprise faced a much tougher challenge during the Great Depression and made it through. Capitalism likewise has proved resilient to foreign warfare, domestic turbulence, and global terrorism, surviving World War II, the Vietnam protests of the 1960s, and the attacks of 9/11. Even communism, which mounted the fiercest intellectual assault that free enterprise ever has endured, fell to bits and gave way (in Russia, at least) to a rudimentary free-market economy.

No, what’s turning capitalism into a minority opinion is a gradual atrophy from within. It’s as though an invisible hand, operating with Oz-like impunity from behind a veil, were determined to crush out the world’s wealth-generating capacity. That capacity depends on a linkage between morals and markets. When that linkage breaks, people imagine that markets have no need for ethics, so they see no need to defend capitalism from the very thing that would undo it: a public erosion of trust, a consequent invasion of government control, and a steady seizing up of the mechanisms of small-business development, job creation, consumer spending, and wealth generation. When those within the system let themselves imagine that markets and morals can operate independently, the raiding parties of greed and avarice swarm like a virus through the system. The broad public, appalled by the spectacle, becomes increasingly distrustful. Laws and regulations swamp the system. To keep up, companies shift their focus from ethics to compliance. Ethics continues to recede.

And that invisible hand? The term comes from Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations and a regular guest dragged onto talk-shows (though he died in 1790) to defend market deregulation. Sadly, that’s the wrong Adam Smith. The one we need to hear from is the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, a book he published 17 years before The Wealth of Nations to probe the reasons for (and necessity of) a moral foundation to society. For Smith, the notion that markets can operate without moral constraints would have been utterly dumbfounding.

As, I suspect, it would be to our Ethics Newsline readers. Our poll provided four options. The view that Occupy Wall Street represents a majority position and is founded on legitimate concerns was shared by 53 percent of our sample. Another 9 percent felt it was a majority view, though rooted in extreme and unfounded criticisms. About 20 percent said it was a minority but legitimate view, while 15.5 percent said it was a wrong view narrowly shared.

Thoughtful, well-meaning people, in other words, now are expressing a deep level of concern about the free-market system. Their voice is being heard. If the system can’t self-correct and recover its ethical foundations, we’re in danger of losing the most successful engine for growth ever invented.

The real question for the coming decades — to use a term from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon loss — is whether we can find the moral blowout preventer that will cap this trend until we can restore the ethical casing through which it’s meant to flow.

©2012 Institute for Global Ethics