Every now and then conservatives play against type. George Will, Peggy Noonan, and Senator David Vitter want to break up the big banks. So does Sandy Weill, the former chairman of Citigroup. In 1999, Congress repealed Glass-Steagall, the 1933 law separating commercial and investment banking, in large part so that Weill wouldn’t be inconvenienced as he merged his company with Travelers Group to create the in our solar system. Then, last year, Weill said it had been a mistake to repeal Glass-Steagall. Now he tells us!

To understand why Weill and so many conservatives have had a change of heart, let’s dust off John Kenneth Galbraith’s The New Industrial State. A 1967 best-seller about an economy that no longer exists might seem a perverse place to start, but bear with me.

Galbraith (who died in 2006) argued that big U.S. corporations had become immune to competition. Any effort to break them up into smaller companies would neither succeed nor—given the complex challenges of a modern economy—be especially desirable. Better to keep them in harness through a partnership with government. “Planning,” Galbraith wrote (in a sentence you could probably get arrested for writing today), “must replace the market.”

Galbraith was writing about manufacturing giants like General Motors and U.S. Steel. These seemed indestructible at the time, but of course they would soon prove all too susceptible to competition from abroad. Still, Galbraith’s vision of the regulatory state comes pretty close to describing today’s relationship between the federal government and a different oligopoly: the Big Six megabanks. Back in 1967, Galbraith judged financiers a “dwindling influence” in the U.S. economy, “honored more for their past eminence than their present power.” That has all changed. Today, finance practically is the economy, gobbling up nearly one-third of all U.S. corporate profits; its practitioners’ earnings now equal fully of gross domestic product.

When the 2008 financial crisis hit, the feds went into Galbraithian planning mode. They bailed out the banks through the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), arranged mergers, and, through the Dodd-Frank bill, required big banks to prepare “living wills” showing how they would dismantle themselves in orderly fashion should the need arise. These actions were loudly protested by many on the right (even though all but Dodd-Frank occurred under a Republican president). The bank bailout, in particular, infuriated Tea Party Republicans through the 2010 elections. Three-term , a Republican who’d voted for one of two TARP bills, was branded “Bailout Bob” and denied renomination at a state convention where the crowd jeered, “TARP, TARP, TARP”