There is a decent reason to be afraid of foreigners under primitive conditions. The problem is it seems like we transferred this fear to the Toyota dealership even though I don't think that anyone seriously thinks the Toyota dealership will come and kill them at dawn. People do not wait tables to serve their fellow man. Most people start businesses would like to make some money. And most businesses that they saw, way to save some money, would seriously consider doing it. So, in essence, what you can say is that the general public tends to underestimate social benefits of relying on the market.
Bryan Caplan, of George Mason University and blogger at EconLog, talks about his book, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies. Caplan argues that democracies work well in giving voters what they want but unfortunately, what voters want isn't particularly wise, especially when it comes to economic policy. He outlines a series of systematic biases we often have on economic topics and explains why we have little or no incentive to improve our understanding of the world and vote wisely. So, it's not special interests that are messing things up but the very incentives that lie at the heart of a vote-based system. This is a disturbing and provocative lens for viewing political outcomes.