The devil made them do it

If the economic situation weren’t so grim, it’d be darkly amusing watching conservatives hunting for a scapegoat other than Bush administration True Believers. (They’re all Brownies now. Heckuva job, eh?) For a generation, devotees of the very bad novelist Ayn Rand have assured us that greed is a virtue and government oversight of financial institutions an impediment to genius. In the “Ownership Society,” financial regulations were for pantywaists. In GOP-think, governments exist purely to drop bombs and monitor other people’s sex lives. Financial deregulation has been the Republican miracle elixir since Ronald Reagan. In March 2008, Sen. John McCain reassured the Wall Street Journal that despite being “aware of the view that there is a ne