This week John McCain is convinced “greed” and “recklessness on Wall Street” are what appear to have replaced an awful lot of our currency with Monopoly money.

Enter Paul Krugman at The New York Times. Krusty the economic clown is usually not my favorite muckraker, but he has a point today. Apparently, before Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac took their respective dives, McCain wrote (or at least signed — you know some staffer actually drafted the thing…) a column for this month’s issue of Contingencies, the magazine of the American Academy of Actuaries.

Here’s McCain’s money quote:

“Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.”  [emphasis added]

More vigorous competition = the free market doing its thang, right?

Or, in the immortal words of Michael Douglas’s Wall Street character Gordon Gekko:

“Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind.”  [Click here for the video, and scroll to 02:41]

Yessir — greed and unfettered economic competition rock! Except when they turn out to suck, you’re running for President, and you’ve just written that they totally don’t suck. Then you have to kinda get all flip-floppy and hope the mere mention of fiscal policy makes us all reach for the remote.

Krugman nails Johnny Mac anyway (he doesn’t watch TV): “So McCain, who now poses as the scourge of Wall Street, was praising financial deregulation like 10 seconds ago.”

Fair enough. Although I note in the interest of completeness that since Barack Obama has apparently gotten $9.9 million from securities and investment firms, and McCain has raked in another $6.9 million, any time either one dares to bite the hand that feeds them, there ought to be a quiet little place inside each of us that cries: “Balls! I recognize those!”