In the short term, Republicans and Democrats alike benefit by allying themselves with the wealthy insiders. Like the GOP, President Obama has benefited from Wall Street money. But in the longer term, enough stories like this New York Times scoop will destroy Republicans, because rhetorically, they're the ones insisting that the market is beneficial and more or less fair, even as a transparently corrupt financial sector consumes a larger percentage of the overall economy.

I'm emphatically for free markets. I have the highlighted copy of The Constitution of Liberty to prove it. But the party of free markets has a self-interested obligation to attack crony capitalism. The party has been failing for years. Democrats have too, but they have less to lose.

"Many of us already view the financial industry as little more than a gigantic shakedown of the American public," Drum writes. "But even so, there are still days when we can be dumbfounded by the sheer scale and gall of their machinations." It isn't enough for the right to point to faulty government regulations and bailouts that have abetted financial-industry shakedowns.

Republicans need to wean themselves from certain donors and make fixing American capitalism a priority, and to go on the offensive against Democrats for their part in Wall Street dysfunction, if they're going to persuade voters that the party of free market capitalism is worth supporting.

A good place to start: rules of the road that make increasing productivity more profitable than decreasing it.

I prefer a theoretical Republican solution to a theoretical Democratic solution, but if Democrats have an actual desire to regulate Wall Street, and Republicans have nothing, that's no choice at all. The GOP has to start attacking Wall Street misbehavior even when it doesn't take the most obvious form: a direct, explicit bailout check from taxpayers to the most well-connected banks.

Earlier this year, George Will wrote, "By breaking up the biggest banks, conservatives will not be putting asunder what the free market has joined together. Government nurtured these behemoths by weaving an improvident safety net and by practicing crony capitalism. Dismantling them would be a blow against government that has become too big not to fail. Aux barricades!"

Co-sign.