The WaPo's E.J. Dionne Jr. opens a can of "Whoop Ass" on Wall Street and "movement conservatives"

The Street on Welfare from E.J. Dionne, Jr. in today's WaPo was outstanding. He leads with, "Never do I want to hear again from my conservative friends about how brilliant capitalists are, how much they deserve their seven-figure salaries and how government should keep its hands off the private economy." And he keeps right on rolling ...

My favorite was perhaps

It's just fine to make it harder for the average Joe to file for bankruptcy, as did that wretched bankruptcy bill passed by Congress in 2005 at the request of the credit card industry. But the big guys are "too big to fail," because they could bring us all down with them.

Ouch! Then again, the following 'aint bad.

As the economist John Kenneth Galbraith noted of the era leading up to the Depression, "The threat to men of great dignity, privilege and pretense is not from the radicals they revile; it is from accepting their own myth. Exposure to reality remains the nemesis of the great -- a little understood thing."

But in the enthusiasm for deregulation that took root in the late 1970s, flowered in the Reagan era and reached its apogee in the second Bush years, we forgot the lesson that government needs to keep a careful watch on what capitalists do. Of course, some deregulation can be salutary, and the market system is, on balance, a wondrous instrument -- when it works. But the free market is just that: an instrument, not a principle.

Another solid lick. But I expect Mr. Dionne knows we'll hear more of the same from the movement conservatives (he never uses that term yet I'm rather sure that's what he means) that control the GOP of today. After all, they've built their whole enterprise off myths like "free enterprise", "family values", "limited government" ... John Gunn