I picked up on the same thing that William Kristol and John Podhoretz did: an important op-ed by Paul Singer, founder and CEO of Elliott Management Corporation, in today’s Wall Street Journal. In Singer’s words:

While many of Mr. Obama’s ideas [proposed at the G-20 meeting in London] warrant skepticism, conservative opposition to any expanded role for government is a mistake. There is an urgent need for a new global regulatory initiative that addresses the primary cause of the financial collapse: highly leveraged and concentrated positions…. this crisis was primarily caused by management and individuals throughout the financial system who exercised extremely poor judgment. The private sector, not the public sector, is where the biggest mistakes were made.

Singer continues:

In the past decade, most global financial institutions built highly leveraged balance sheets — sometimes as high as 30 to 1 — that were stuffed with risky assets. These institutions also bought on a large scale for their own accounts the same securities they sold to their customers. Our anachronistic regulatory framework didn’t catch the problems, and warped incentives and compensation schemes fueled the risk-control failures that eventually brought on the crisis we face today.

I don’t pretend to be an expert on the current financial crisis, which is a complicated matter. But Singer’s piece strikes me as a sober, clear-eyed, and reasonable analysis of the problem we face, by someone who knows of what he speaks. It recognizes other factors that contributed to the present financial crisis — from easy money to government encouraging lending to people who were unlikely to repay their loans — but it does not let the private sector off the hook. And Singer offers specific ideas on what the new regulatory infranstructure might look like.

There is an impulse in many conservatives to aim their wrath only at government failures and oppose any government action. That is understandable, given the mistakes and unintended consequences created by government over the years and the unprecedented prosperity and human flourishing brought about by free markets. But conservatism is also deeply grounded in empirical evidence. And in this instance, if we are to properly defend democratic capitalism and free markets, we need to be willing to (in the tradition of Burke) promote necessary reforms from time to time. Conservatism is at its best when it is both principled and non-ideological, when it demonstrates intellectual rigor and promotes practical solutions to the challenges we face. That, I think, is what Singer is arguing for. It is hard to argue with the case he has made. And his approach is, in my estimation, the right approach in countering Obamaism, precisely because it is anchored in reality.