'The Government is the Solution'

At the end of what the Wall Street Journal called "The Week That Changed American Capitalism," it's worth asking, how much will it change government, and the public perception of federal institutions and the people who work for them?

At any point in the last, oh, 50 years, would you have expected to see the following lead paragraph to a story in the Washington Post?

The Bush administration yesterday proposed a historic $500 billion bailout of financial firms that would let the government rather than the cold judgment of the marketplace decide the winners and losers from the crisis that has shaken the U.S. economy for the past year.

"The last 20 years saw people acually mouthing the idea that government should keep hands off," Richard Sylla, a financial historian at New York University, told the Journal. "We had this free market ethos: Reagan's 'government isn't a solution, government is the problem.' Now people are saying, 'The market is the problem. The government is the solution.' "

This, of course, is hardly the first time the government has intervened in the financial markets in a pretty big way. But this was really big, and that makes it a potential game-changer in terms of the way Americans view their government. That will depend on whether the faith we are placing in public institutions now will survive the test of time, and whether it extends beyond the financial regulatory realm.