Mother of all ironies

It seemed like graduation day was coming, and George W Bush was going to leave office as a free market hero. Bush and the last half dozen presidents before him have de-regulated nearly everything there was to de-regulate. Capital was king and those who have it make the rules to ensure they kept it. The government was made impotent to oversee or even peer into corporate dealings. The buzzword was "specific market failure", that was used to prevent nearly everything that was proposed to regulate business activites. Everything from accounting rules to greater consolidation to climate change was a non starter without a 'specific market failure' to warrant action. When some of them did rear their heads like Putin likes to do, some superficial knee jerk laws were passed that did little to constrain the advance of unfettered capitalism. Not even the debacle of energy market de-regulation, Enron, and the ensuing accounting scandals could stop the inexorable march towards private control of everything. Medicare was partially privatized with the Plan-D pharmaceutical subsidy. An unsucessful attempt was made to privatize social security but it remained on the wish list and probably still is there. Free market was the mantra and it was pushed to its ideolical extreme. Acedemics like Greenspan who ran the Treasury and the Fed, who were by no means opposed to the free market ideology, were replaced by industry executives Paulson and Bernanke by Bush. In the same manner as he did so many other things, Bush was able to bring the ideology to its extremes and enscone it in the Washington consensus as dogma.

Now, with the implosion of the US financial system, it appears to be forcing the hand of the Bush administration to abandon its plan to act as a repository for the big financial institutions to unload worthless assets on. To try and keep the global economy from all but dying, Paulson is now seriously proposing to give money directly to banks, in exchange for a federal ownership share. Due in large part to the failure of their ideology when taken to extremes, the free market chamion is socializing a huge portion of the country's finance system.