But what's flabbergasting is the raised middle finger our most respected financial institutions are provocatively (and desperately) waving at the ghost of Ayn Rand:
Wall Street's elite banks, longtime freedom fighters for deregulation and scorners of all government intervention in the marketplace, are now begging, cup in hand, for aid from a gallery of regimes that includes some of the most authoritarian and undemocratic governments on the planet.
So says Andrew Leonard, who has a detailed post on the new Freedom-Free Free Market.
Likewise, Elizabeth Warren finds fervant support for government intervention from even the most unlikeliest of sources—William F. Buckley:
After prattling on for several paragraphs about the beauty of the market, he does a quick double axel and declares that we should have regulated the mortgage lenders and mortgage brokers much earlier. Now, he says, the federal government has no choice but to halt all foreclosures "until the disparity between true value and hypothetical value is pounded away by time and inflation."
As Warren notes, hell hath frozen over and Buckley is skating on the rink in the Ninth Circle.
So much for the supremacy of the unfettered free market. The new definition of a liberal may well be a conservative whose home value and stock portfolio has tanked.
