Kevin Williamson has a terrific essay in the latest National Review about how the bailed out big boys of Wall Street are suddenly swinging from Barack Obama to Mitt Romney. Williamson concludes of these fair-weather friends:
They are the repo men, headpiece filled with subprime-mortgage derivatives, and they are looking to repossess the Republican party they abandoned in 2008. Free-market, limited-government conservatives should be none too eager to welcome them back, nor should we let our natural sympathy with the profit motive blind us to the fact that a great many of them do not belong in the conservative movement, and that more than a few of them belong in prison.
This set Hugh Hewitt all aflutter, though all he can do is bleat “that’s Bildeberger” and insist there’s no “they” in the face of Williamson’s statistics. Part of this is Hewitt’s natural tendency to suppress his conservatism in defense of Romney, but many conservatives tend to assume that big business is naturally on their side.
Not so. An industry that gives 70 percent of its donations to Obama, that takes federal bailout money, that does special favors for Nancy Pelosi, that suppresses potential competitors, isn’t pro-free market. The sooner conservatives understand the difference between pro-business and pro-market, the better off we’ll be. Williamson’s piece is a good place to start.
