O'Rourke accounts for our sins

PJ O'Rourke is mad at everyone:

What will destroy our country and us is not the financial crisis but the fact that liberals think the free market is some kind of sect or cult, which conservatives have asked Americans to take on faith. That's not what the free market is. The free market is just a measurement, a device to tell us what people are willing to pay for any given thing at any given moment. The free market is a bathroom scale. You may hate what you see when you step on the scale. "Jeeze, 230 pounds!" But you can't pass a law making yourself weigh 185. Liberals think you can. And voters--all the voters, right up to the tippy-top corner office of Goldman Sachs--think so too.

We, the conservatives, who do understand the free market, had the responsibility to--as it were--foreclose upon this mess. The market is a measurement, but that measuring does not work to the advantage of a nation or its citizens unless the assessments of volume, circumference, and weight are conducted with transparency and under the rule of law. We've had the rule of law largely in our hands since 1980. Where is the transparency? It's one more job we botched.

Mostly, though, he's mad at conservatives for not making the most of 28 years on top (he dates being on top all the way to Reagan and dismisses the '93-'94 period, I suppose). His rant - which is quite lengthy - is half over-the-top and three-quarters spot-on.

What he does not offer are any ideas on how to fix it, though he seems a bit fatalistic and unencouraged that we shall ever get the opportunity in the lifetime of anyone alive today. But perhaps conservative leaders will read it and be jolted into reality, causing some smart thinker to begin getting us out of this mess.