Nobody realized, I guess, that when Francis Fukuyama termed the finale of Cold War ideological combat the "end of history" we were less than 20 years away from the evident implosion of the free-market system - and this time, our own retirement accounts, savings... our futures... would be the history kissed off.

Wow. Have things ever changed in just the past few months! I was breezin' through late summer when - poof! - I woke up one day in mid-September and realized now I'll need to work until I'm 80 f*ckin' years old because that nagging piper who always needs paying finally caught up with our Ponzi-scheme economy.

Since this is my week to propose empty, feel-good gestures, I say we need a red-letter, symbolic end to the corkscrewy ideology of a self-correcting, unfettered market - that plum dream of conservatives, hardcore libertarians, neoconservative economists and hotboxing MBA students with access to that fine, fine prescription bud. Communism's collapse came two decades ago, Francis, with gleeful youth sledgehammering the divide between East and West Germany. How about our own capitalist-based Fall of the Berlin Wall? Maybe... we...truck-bomb Wall Street?

...Metaphorically, of course...

Hey, wait! Simplify: We find a big, honkin' statue of Ronald Reagan - one of his life-sized, self-reverential santos - and debase it somehow. We don't have to pull it down or blow-torch the noggin, Baghdad-style. And none of that shoe-pounding like they did with Saddam's massive bronze idols - there's been far to much pedicurial stuff already this week.

Of course, Reagan is a somewhat arbitrary pick as our symbolic scapegoat, as we cast about for a spike to put in the heart of now-saturnine free-market ideology. But even conservatives bandy about his name as a generic for deregulation. Reagan's term really gassed up the whole process. The idea of removing all restrictions and rules from business - especially within the financial estate - began in the '70s, and it was then, long before the 40th President took office, that deregulation began with airlines and trucking, along with initial "reforms" that swept away government oversight in railroads, telephones, natural gas, and banking.

Oops! Banking! It was that big-hair, bad-mullet Reagan era in which pruning our money tree free of all those troublesome, backward rules was an idea embraced with almost evangelical zeal by Wall Street and the White House; regulatory caps started popping off interest rates from... well... Delaware to South Dakota, states that initiated Loanshark America on hapless borrowers.

The idea, evidently, was to upend a system that had begun in the 1880s with the Interstate Commerce Commission and really took off at the turn of the 20th century, when muckraking writers chronicled the misdeeds of high-flying robber barons. These accounts, along with reform activists and politicians, stoked public passion to rein-in the ravenous excesses of big business; and, yes, burdensome bureaucracy burgeoned to administer all these new regulatory hoops through which American capitalism would jump.

Slowly, the battle see-sawed between free-market true believers and realists aware that business is a money-making enterprise, that money-making creates incentive to maximize earnings and profits, and mechanisms to tap maximized rewards are driven - ideally - by uncontrolled greed. Let's be honest: Mr. Gecko was right, greed is the propellant. For any of us, with our common, tawdry human nature, reward invests itself with need for more reward as a kind of self-perpetuating piggy bank.

In the past few years, our piggy-bank priorities have been running hog-wild.

The first-wave deregulation of the Reagan years ended badly as the decade closed out, when the savings and loan industry combusted. Then came a grinding recession that tubbed the presidency of George Bush I, Reagan's successor. The Clinton years and the phat '90s were fueled by the first, embarrassed, youthful gropings of globilization and that new thingy-bob, the internet.

When the tech boom went bust at the turn of the millennium, it was obvious a pattern had developed stretching back at least 30 years to the Nixon recessions and his interminable "phased" fixes. We were locked into 10-year boom-bust cycles, all fed off specific, self-contained but economically communicative "bubbles". We had high-tech, housing, omnipresent petroleum and its offshoots. A case could be made the '60ss were propelled along by the first expansions of our military/industrial bubble - especially in regard to the aerospace industry and the neverending Vietnam War. The "MI Complex" was a treasured sugartit that left many high-flying players - from engineers to traders - high and dry when a figment of peace broke out in the early '70s.

A theory gained traction that steep declines following these economic booms could be ameliorated by repealing or diluting regulations which, admittedly, added cost and expanded necessary liability preventatives with rules about, say, health and safety of workers. Some eggheads posited that booms could be self-sustaining if all that troublesome rule stuff went away; economists adopted a worldview similar to teen-aged brat-packs who smoke in school restrooms and ditch study hall to cruise the boulevards. Enough with your tired, old rules, maaaan!  

They saw bright, new days in the sun, as broken down by the redoubtable Wikipedia's sketch of deregulation: 

In an absolutely free-market economy, all capital, goods, services, and money flow transfers are unregulated by the government except to stop collusion or fraud that may take place among market participants. As this protection must be funded, such a government taxes only to the extent necessary to perform this function, if at all. This state of affairs is also known as laissez-faire. Internationally, free markets are advocated by proponents of economic liberalism; in Europe this is usually simply called liberalism. In the United States, support for free market is associated most with libertarianism. Since the 1970s, promotion of a global free-market economy, deregulation and privatization, is often described as neoliberalism. The term free market economy is sometimes used to describe some economies that exist today (such as Hong Kong), but pro-market groups would only accept that description if the government practices laissez-faire policies, rather than state intervention in the economy. An economy that contains significant economic interventionism by government, while still retaining some characteristics found in a free market is often called a mixed economy.

Then came Sept. 15, the market's termination event, and the party was over. Although Obama's people promise to tighten the reins on our runaway horses, perhaps the barn is already empty - and all is for naught. There are still some out there - with thick, viscous scales still covering their eyes - who maintain we need more deregulation.

At a going-away party for a friend on the weekend before Black Monday, I listened to him grouse that his investments in Freddie Mac would vaporize if the struggling home-mortgage facilitator was taken over by the feds (along with Fannie Mae, Freddie was shanking as the soon-to-explode housing crisis reached its melting point). When I suggested that deregulation might not have been such a good idea, and that tighter government oversight of FMAC's loan qualifications and procedures might have been... useful... he exploded. Nope! Dammit! It was the regulations that caused the mess!

This is a smart, energetic guy. Middle-aged, gay, savvy investor and dyed in the wool libertarian - pretty much a dream date for Justin Raimondo (he's also in great shape). But even at that late hour he couldn't let go of the deregulation orthodoxy. 

There we were on the shaded patio of his just-sold San Fernando Valley home (did I mention he's savvy), and thinking about our heated conversation that sun-drenched day is startling: Three months ago seems so far away, as remote and misty as Nov. 21, 1963 - another time swaddled in storied innocence and clueless optimism, charged by our contemporary knowledge of its impending tumble into darkness.

So, for our ritualized slaughter of the Free Market Fatted Calf, let's get together the National Legal and Policy Center, the Free Enterprise Action Fund, Capital Research Center, National Center for Public Policy Research, and Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise. They were all lined up in the by-and-by, hooping it up to dump the bureaucrats. Let loop in all the personalities, including himself - Alan Greenspan, Ayn Rand acolyte and one-time poobah of the Federal Reserve. More than anyone else, his flawed belief system led us to our unfettered free-fall. 

In fact, maybe the ceremony itself could climax at the feet of the tough-love market prophetess herself, in the culmination of a pilgrimage to Ayn Rand Land. (While no actual proof has surfaced that Ayn Rand Land actually exists, there are rumors of it shining on somewhere out in the hills and gullies - a vivid, resilient, yet peaceful habitation where the truly inspired Big Thinkers can live out bold lives free of pedestrian constraints and nattering, bourgeois convention of the little people. Lo! There are sketchy rumors of kiddie rides in Ayn Rand Land, although the rollercoaster is constantly imperiled by bombs set by its designer, unhappy that human imperfection marred his perfect arcade vision. VISION! Damn you!)

There, in the torchlight, awash in debt and remorse, as the hot skag of the bailout courses through our body politic, bringing us salvation today and penury tomorrow, we can quote from Alexander Tyler's 220-year-old "Fall of the Athenian Republic":

"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse over loose fiscal policy, (which is) always followed by a dictatorship.

"The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:

"From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance, From abundance to complacency; From complacency to apathy, From apathy to dependence, From dependence back into bondage."