The End of the "Free" Market?

This week has been insane, with the bailout of AIG, the collapse of Lehman Bros and the buyout of Merrill Lynch, and finally the massive $700 billion federal financial rescue plan. It's an unprecedented repudiation of the ideals of deregulation and limited oversight as championed by fiscal conservatives over the past 3 decades. Ronald Reagan, that slick snakecharmer, used to famously say that government wasn't the solution---it was the problem. Well, considering that these federal bailouts were literally the ONLY OPTION for preventing Great Depression-like financial ruin, I wonder what the Gipper would be thinking now. Seems that government was the only solution possible here. Free Market Fundamendalists like to think that the market will solve all problems through some sort of magical, mystical, Santa Claus-like "invisible hand." But what happens when that hand is caught in the cookie jar? Who slaps that hand when it's been bad?

I only wish that the collapse of conservative ideology could happen in a vaccuum and didn't have to drag the rest of us down.