'Govern me!' he cried.

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'NEVER do I want to hear again from my conservative friends about how brilliant capitalists are ... and how government should keep its hands off the private economy." So proclaimed the Washington Post's E. J. Dionne in near-ecstatic schadenfreude over the current credit crisis.

"The Wall Street titans have turned into a bunch of welfare clients," he cackles. "They are desperate to be bailed out by government from their own incompetence, and from the deregulatory regime for which they lobbied so hard.... Enter the federal government, the institution to which the wealthy are not supposed to pay capital gains or inheritance taxes. Good God, you don't expect these people to trade in their BMWs for Saturns, do you?"

Renowned philosopher William Cohen--also known as a former liberal-Republican senator from Maine--gets to the heart of it for Dionne: "We have been saying for so long that government is the enemy. Government is the enemy until you need a friend."

Well, maybe. But for Dionne and countless others, the fact that we need the government in an emergency seems to imply that the government can act like the Friend Who Won't Leave (anyone remember that Saturday Night Live skit?). Dionne and those like him greet every calamity not as a narrow justification for limited action, but as a sweeping writ for permanent intervention.

Consider 9/11. In its immediate aftermath, liberal intellectuals rushed to the scene like ambulance chasers to proclaim that their client--the government--had been vindicated. "This catastrophe has reminded us of a ...