This 1967 article by Murray Rothbard, father of modern libertarianism, written as a commentary on Lyndon Johnson?s Great Society, explains nicely how George Bush and Henry Paulson have put progressives like Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi right in their comfort zone.  Modern day liberals are historically accurate in describing themselves as progressives. I personally think that we should follow their lead and stop calling them liberals, which they are not. Remember, the root of the word liberal is liberty. What they are are old fashioned 20th Century progressives. Their lineage and their philosophy are traced directly back to the American progressive movement of the early 20th Century. This was a movement that pushed for a tripartite marriage of big government, big business, and big unions. The idea, often called corporatism, was to use big government to cartellize industries, insulating their profits by protecting them from competition. In exchange big business and labor unions agreed to advance the militaristic and/or social engineering agendas, which have often gone hand in hand, of the bureaucratic and technocratic elite. This is exactly the process that was started with Fannie and Freddie Mac, and the Banks; was advanced with the Bush-Paulson-Pelosi bailouts; and is continuing with the UAW, big three  bailout about to take place. Rothbard, in 1967, using the work of the historian of the Progressive era, Gabrian Kolko, explains exactly what?s going on today:

?the shift toward statism in the Progressive period was impelled by the very big-business groups who were supposed, in the liberal mythology, to be defeated and regulated by the Progressive?measures. Rather than a “people’s movement” to check big business; the drive for regulatory measures, Kolko shows, stemmed from big businessmen whose attempts at monopoly had been defeated by the competitive market, and who then turned to the federal government as a device for compulsory cartellization. This drive for cartellization through government accelerated during the New Era of the 1920s and reached its apex in Franklin Roosevelt’s NRA. Significantly, this exercise in cartellizing collectivism was put over by organized big business; after Herbert Hoover, who had done much to organize and cartellize the economy, had balked at an NRA as going too far toward an outright fascist economy, the US Chamber of Commerce won a promise from FDR that he would adopt such a system. The original inspiration was the corporate state of Mussolini’s Italy.[8]

The formal corporatism of the NRA is long gone, but… [t]he locus of social power has been emphatically assumed by the state apparatus. Furthermore, that apparatus is permanently governed by a coalition of big-business and big-labor groupings, groups that use the state to operate and manage the national economy. The usual tripartite rapprochement of big business, big unions, and big government symbolizes the organization of society by blocs, syndics, and corporations, regulated and privileged by the federal, state, and local governments. What this all amounts to in essence is the “corporate state,” which, during the 1920s, served as a beacon light for big businessmen, big unions, and many liberal intellectuals as the economic system proper to a 20th-century industrial society.

Today progressives are using corporate statism to forward the social engineering agenda of the environmental movement. The goals have shifted for today’s progressives. They have backed off from the tired old socialist clich?s, of their forefathers, focused on mundane goals like income equality. Today their designs are even greater, i.e., saving the planet from the destruction of global warming (note how the auto companies are falling over themselves trying to prove how ?green? they are to Congress). While the proximate goals have shifted, the means remain the same.