"Wall Street is not a bastion of free-market laissez faire capitalism."

Writing at USA Today, Hoover Institution research fellow Peter Schweizer points out that President Obama's proposed Wall Street "reforms may be pro-business, but they're not pro-free market":

President Obama's proposed reform of Wall Street calls for creating a list of large financial firms ("Tier 1 financial holding companies") that will be officially designated as "too big to fail." They will, in short, be guaranteed rescue by taxpayers if they get into financial difficulty. This will be disastrous because it will encourage further speculation and saddle taxpayers with the cost of cleaning up future trillion-dollar financial messes.

The simple fact is that this sort of big government coddling is what got us into this mess in the first place. Wall Street is not a bastion of free-market laissez faire capitalism. Consider this simple question: How many times have the big firms like Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, etc. been bailed out in the past 15 years? The big firms on Wall Street have been rescued from their profligate investments half a dozen times since 1994. And that propelled us to near collapse in 2008.

Read the rest here.