Laissez-faire Reaganomics

The best way to remove a band-aid is with one sharp tug.

I hate arguing these blanket problems, I start to sound like those babbling buffoons on talk radio stations, who argue themselves in circles and blame everyone but themselves for society's problems. Perhaps I should stick to what I know best; sarcastic analyses of individual issues. God knows I'm no Milton Friedman. However...

One of TAE's best friends, a lawyer from Dallas, TX, made the important point this morning that socialism (my sworn enemy) is typically a problem we talk about in association with liberals. Usually society paints a picture where the conservatives are greedy, self-interested old white men who discuss money and power in dark rooms while smoking cigars, while the liberals are young people, out on the street, shouting in a protest for the rights of the people.
Lately, as I've shown, the conservatives are the ones that are trying to enable the rights of the minorities, and the liberals are the ones that are pushing for protection of the free market.

The problem, as I see it (having no classical political education, just my own self-righteous indignation) is that left-wing and right-wing are misnomers for similars point on a wheel. If free market capitalism is on one point in a wheel, then classical liberals and conservatives are both near that point. Diametrically opposite of free market capitalism is a police state. That term immediately sends up red flags with many people, and they doubt we are there, or ever could be there, but when companies get so large (via government help) that they cannot sustain themselves and then collapse, only to be taken over by the government (via forced taxpayer help) then the reader needs to think really hard about how far-off a police state really is.
Anyway, neo-liberals and neo-conservatives lie closer to this point, in fact, lately they seem so close as to resemble the same point on the wheel (see here for awesome visual, but please ignore the text, anyone that refers to "the Leviathan" should be ignored).
When left-wingers argue for more government regulation to protect the American people, they point at the "right-wing" as if those who are against the legislation they propose are far, far away from their ideas of government regulation as a good thing.
Then the right-wingers argue for more government regulation to "protect the economy" and point to the left-wingers as fools who don't understand how a free market works.

Now maybe I am over-simplifying the definitions here, but the Fannie/Freddie bailout was endorsed on both sides of the aisle, for very different reasons. Any Congressperson who was truly committed to protection of a free market economy would have quickly acknowledged that bankruptcy of the two mortgage lenders was the only way for the housing market to correct. All the legislators have done by bailing the companies out is delayed/slowed the inevitable crunch until someone else is working on Capitol Hill.