Good Steve Pearlstein appreciates the virtues of open markets, a low and stable tax burden, and a limited but effective tax burden. Bad Steve Pearlstein writes things like this:

In the book, we discover that Obama is the first president in history to “declare war on private enterprise.” And on the stump, the Bad Mitt likes to quip that the president “sees business as a necessary evil, and maybe not even necessary.”
Mitt knows this because deficit spending has risen during a deep recession, a federal health reform bill has passed, a financial crisis has led to tighter regulation on Wall Street and a plan to deal with global warming was proposed but not enacted. Oh, I almost forgot — the president didn’t name a single business executive to his original Cabinet. From this naturally flows the conclusion that the United States is “inches away from ceasing to be a free-market economy.” Inches!
“It breaks my heart to see what’s happening in this country,” the Bad Mitt said last week while announcing his candidacy.
Just to review: The Bolsheviks have taken over, capitalism as we know it is about to come to an end and, yet, somehow the Dow Jones industrial average has gained 47 percent since the Obama inauguration, private-sector profits are back at record levels and business investment in new equipment and software is growing at the annual rate of 11.7 percent. How weird is that?

Just to review: capitalism and a free-market economy aren’t the same thing. Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, by William Baumol, Robert Litan, and Carl Schramm, divides capitalist economies into several categories, including oligarchic, state-guided, managerial, and, finally, entrepreneurial capitalism, which could serve as a proxy for a “free-market economy.” One could fret that we’re shifting from entrepreneurial capitalism to, say, state-guided or managerial capitalism without claiming that the Bolsheviks are taking over.

Stock markets have fared well in many state-guided economies and economies dominated by large firms. Private-sector profits can be quite high in these economies as well. Indeed, high profits might actually be an indication of the strength of incumbents, as Ashwin Parameswaran’s mico-fragility/macro-stability thesis would suggest.

I don’t doubt that Mitt Romney engages in a lot of hyperbole, as do many politicians. But come on: free markets are rare in history and politically very vulnerable. It is entirely reasonable to be concerned about the prospects for preserving them, and for freeing markets that aren’t sufficiently open.