The St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Kevin Horrigan criticizes ‘free market’ conservatives who have mostly rigged the system to serve only their own interests: “Regulators were the enemy, so their ranks were gutted. The Coast Guard built ships that broke in half on the high seas. Children died from tainted toys. Soldiers died for lack of armor. When some began insisting that home buyers actually have the money to repay the mortgages that were were handed out, the housing bubble finally burst. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac hired scores of lobbyists and paid handsome executive salaries until someone finally noticed that, hey, we’re out of money.

As a wise observer (actually, it was James Galbraith’s father, the late Keynesian economist John Kenneth Galbraith) once noted, “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

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