Republicans have spent decades branding Democrats as anti-capitalist collectivists bent on the destruction of private property and free enterprise. In the Right’s propa-melodrama, the leftist locomotive flattens virtuous Little Nell’s of capitalism after tying them to the railroad tracks of taxes with the ropes of regulation.

The character inversion is pure genius.

Nicholas Wapshott’s book, Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics, attempts to explain the debate that began in the 1930s between two great economists– John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek– regarding the cause of the Great Depression and the implication of possible cures.

What makes Ha-Joon Chang’s new book, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, such a joy to read, is not the challenge it poses to the bad economics that undergirds global finance, though it does precisely that. Just as Thomas did nearly 40 years ago, Chang’s book succeeds, fundamentally, because it challenges the dead language that is used to market as progress our growing political discontent.

PhRMA has truly turned exploiting their government-sanctioned monopolies into a money-making art form.

What is considered “conservative” philosophy in this country (no regulation or social safety net, government helping big businesses and offering low taxes to the rich) is not conservative in the traditional sense of preserving the status quo. It is a radical pro-wealth, pro-corporate control, anti-public-investment ideology. What makes this radical position so dangerous is, as we saw in the Bush years, that it produces in the short term the illusion that it works. Yet eventually, the check comes due in a big way, such as the BP oil spill and the financial meltdown. It’s the equivalent of killing your dairy cows to have a feast.

Rand Paul’s ambivalence (and by “ambivalence” I mean “antipathy until he realized he was getting killed politically”) towards Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, followed immediately by his “sometimes accidents happen” defense of BP against big neck-booting meanie Obama gave us a great reminder of the biggest of all of conservatism’s zombie big lies: The free market makes regulation unnecessary.