A meme making the rounds is that it’s ironic that pro-capitalist firms are now going hat in hand to the federal government for bailouts.

But why think the beggars have any concern about capitalism? As the writer of this NRO piece shows, the Democrats have raked in far more campaign cash than the Republicans (not that the GOP has anything but a rhetorical attachment to laissez-faire).

The notion that our financial markets are bastions of free enterprise is woefully out of date. Like many large (and certainly some small) businesses, the big Wall Street firms are advocates of syndicalism. They like having a cozy relationship with the government. The consequences of those cozy relationships are now becoming painfully obvious.

We wouldn’t be in the mess if we had insisted on the separation of business and state. It wasn’t advocates of laissez-faire who took us down this path.