"When I picked up my newspaper yesterday, I thought I woke up in France. But no, it turns out socialism is alive and well in America."

So said Republican Sen. Jim Bunning of Kentucky at a hearing of the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday, thus confirming the conventional wisdom that as a political philosopher, he was a pretty good righthanded pitcher.

In 22 years in Congress — 12 in the House, 10 in the Senate — ol' No. 17 has proved to be a devout conservative. A frequent critic of the Federal Reserve Bank, Bunning's ire on Tuesday was directed at Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who have had the temerity to suggest they might want to intervene to stop a major meltdown of the U.S. housing and mortgage industries.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two giant federally sponsored mortgage companies, have liquidity problems. Too many homeowners are defaulting on their mortgages. Inasmuch as Fannie and Freddie buy about two-thirds of all new U.S. mortgages from the financial institutions that originate the loans, and inasmuch as their failure might plunge the economy into a huge hole from which it would take years to recover, some people — including President George W. Bush — think it would be a good idea for the government to step in and help.

Not Jim Bunning, and not many other truly devout conservatives. They believe that what they call the free market will sort things out in the end, that government intervention always is a bad thing, that a little social chaos is a necessary cost in letting supply and demand determine the allocation of goods and services. Otherwise, you end up like Soviet Russia. Or, worse, France.

This view seems unnecessarily cruel to me, but give Bunning credit for intellectual integrity.

It's hard to find a true conservative anymore. As economist James K. Galbraith points out in "The Predator State," a book to be published next month, what we call "conservatism" today is actually "an economic system wherein entire sectors have been built up to feast on public systems built originally for public purposes and largely serving the middle class."

His theory: There's no such thing as a "free market" anymore. The market has been rigged and the government taken captive by predators posing as conservatives. Truly principled conservatives have disappeared into irrelevance, where they join liberals who still are trying futilely to bend market theory to fit their social goals.

"There are those who praise the free market because to do so gives cover to themselves and their friends in raiding the public trough," Galbraith writes. "These people call themselves 'conservatives,' and one of the truly galling things for real conservatives is that they have both usurped the label and spoiled the reputation of the real thing. And there are those who praise the 'free market' simply because they fear that, otherwise, they will be exposed as heretics, accused of being socialists, perhaps even driven from public life."

Galbraith argues that the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s created philosophical cover for corporate conservatives to seize the government and use it for narrow, private goals rather than to serve broad public goals. The practice has reached its apotheosis during George W. Bush's administration. Galbraith writes:

"In the final analysis, Bush is remarkable merely for his lack of interest in hiring committed intellectuals to shill for his policies and, therefore, to court rejection by the principled conservative crowd. He ran an unapologetic government of businessmen and lobbyists, governing largely without academic governor."

Wars were outsourced to profit-making companies. When the wars sucked resources away from, say, the Corps of Engineers' levee repair program, the recovery effort that became necessary was outsourced to profit-making companies. Timber, mining and health care policies were turned over to lobbyists for the timber, mining and pharmaceutical companies. American jobs were shipped overseas in the interest of cheaper goods and higher profits.

Chief executives became richer than Midas. Executive power, both in the corporate suites and at the White House, was to be unchallenged. Galbraith notes that the motto of the administration might well have been, "Freedom rules when money talks."

Regulators were the enemy, so their ranks were gutted. The Coast Guard built ships that broke in half on the high seas. Children died from tainted toys. Soldiers died for lack of armor. When some began insisting that home buyers actually have the money to repay the mortgages that were handed out, the housing bubble finally burst. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac hired scores of lobbyists and paid handsome executive salaries until someone finally noticed that, hey, we're out of money.

As a wise observer (actually, it was James Galbraith's father, the late Keynesian economist John Kenneth Galbraith) once noted, "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."

It's going to take a long time to fix the mess these modern conservatives have left us. Liberals, of course, are outraged. True conservatives should be, too.

Kevin Horrigan is a columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.