鲍尔森对自由市场的新认识：如何让市场有效。

There's an elephant in the room every time Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson steps to a podium to recount the serial emergency actions he and other top officials have taken (and, as revealed Monday, will continue to take) to prop up, bail out, jerry-rig, bolster, stabilize, or otherwise rescue capitalists and property owners.

That invisible beast? America's free market.

The events of the past six months are forcing Paulson (and everyone else) to do some hard, and agonizing, thinking about the faith we once had in the free market's ability to self-correct without sinking the economy. The end result will be a new and strange footprint on American politics, as a Bush administration that ditched its free-market dogma gives way to an Obama administration that ditches its leftist supporters to save capitalism.

Yesterday, Bush's Treasury secretary opened a telling window onto his thinking about that vexing subject - and in the process revealed just how much the financial crisis is already merging the economic voices of the two major parties. At a Fortune 500 Forum in Washington, Paulson was asked to reflect on lessons learned over these past tumultuous months, and to define what constitutes appropriate government intervention in the markets. "Are there some hard lines that you think about that should not be crossed?" one executive asked.

The former Goldman Sachs (GS, Fortune 500) CEO would have issued a firm yes just a year ago. He's a lot less sure now. "Some of the things I've been part of have been very, very objectionable decisions," Paulson averred, "but they haven't been difficult decisions" because the alternative would have been much worse. He added: "I look at some of the things that I have done as being essential to preserve the free-market system."

Then Paulson's answer took an especially interesting turn. "Here's the way I think about regulation and the free market system," he said. "We need to get to a place in this country where no institution is too big or too interconnected to fail...because regulation alone is never going to solve the problem. There's no regulator that's going to be so good they're going to be able to deal with or ferret out all the problems. So it takes balance between the right regulatory system and market discipline."

"Only if we have the freedom to fail," Paulson insisted, "is there really going to be the freedom to succeed."

Who does that sound like? One of President-elect Barack Obama's most liberal advisers, former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich, recently wrote this on his blog: "Pardon me for asking, but if a company is too big to fail, maybe - just maybe - it's too big, period."