The free market's ability to control business is about as effective as the electorate's ability to control government: at best, imperfect. Businessmen are trained to game the market just like politicians are selected for their ability to frustrate the ballot-box. Government bureaucrats are indistinguishable from business executives, in fact, in any industry, people job-hop across the public/private boundary effortlessly. "Entrepreneurs" are about as rare in business as "statesmen" are in politics.

Everyone, even liberals, agrees that bureaucracies, private or public, are self-serving organisms whose primary purpose is to perpetuate themselves.

The main difference between liberals and conservatives is that the latter have somehow convinced themselves that their own desire to exercise economic power through control of a private enterprise is somehow fundamentally different than a politician's desire to exert political power through the legislature, the executive, or the bureaucracy. And both men, regardless of their initial dedication and virtue, are inevitably morally compormised by the necessity to get re-elected or to make a profit. This is not a ideological or moral statement, it is an anthropological observation.

As I have said many times before in this forum, but which my critics have always managed to ignore, is that the only way we can create a humane and effective politico/economic system is to set the public and private sectors into an adversarial relationship so each can restrict the abuses of the other. This is not a Utopian dream, this is what America has always done, and it has taught the rest of the free world how to do it, and it works.

I realize this analysis is over-simplified and highly idealized, but I am also convinced it is fundamentally sound. The only differences between us should be in detail and implementation, not in ideology.