“Free market” has always struck me as a rather strange phrase. Never more so than in this period of financial market disasters. The phrase ‘free market’ continues to be used reflexively. Just as commentators go right on speaking of Wall St. as a source of capital and innovation, few want to ask out loud why we need most of Wall St.’s “services”; few people are openly using the most obvious words to describe these services as gambling; and, we go right on using this phrase, “free market” to describe an economy that is not free and in many sectors not a market. A recent exception to this are the comments of Ben Friedman, a professor of economics at Harvard, who said, speaking on the PBS Newshour1 of the continuing high percentage of our “best and brightest” going to employment on Wall St., “…it’s all the more troubling when I think that, after...