David Brooks has discovered the unbridled hubris and radical nature of the Obama administration:

President Obama has concentrated enormous power on a few aides in the West Wing of the White House. These aides are unrolling a rapid string of plans: to create three million jobs, to redesign the health care system, to save the auto industry, to revive the housing industry, to reinvent the energy sector, to revitalize the banks, to reform the schools — and to do it all while cutting the deficit in half.

True, Brooks still clings to the notion that the Obama team has retained a “realistic sensibility” (do all that and get money back!?). But he has at least divined that all of this signifies the greatest American government expansion in our or anyone’s lifetime, and the eradication of our semi-free market capitalist system as we have known it up until now. So he concedes, “All in all, I can see why the markets are nervous and dropping.” Indeed. (One investor summed things up today: “Basically, the market’s giving you no vote of confidence on the Obama administration’s approach to solving the economic woes the country is facing.”)

And we have seen what happens even before the Obama administration sets to work. The mere prospect of all this hyperventilating combined with a few false starts on a bailout have sent the markets into a record slide. None of this bespeaks of any sort of realism or modesty by the Obama team. They seem entirely delighted by the opportunity to undertake huge, complicated, and interconnected tasks and run them out of the West Wing and Tim Geithner’s office.

But this is not a Geithner problem per se. Even if Geithner did not have the demeanor of  a frazzled grad student, it would be impossible to convince all the key players in the economy that displacement of so much of the private sector was a reasonable or desirable undertaking.

Back in the days of the campaign, the fear of many conservatives was that Obama talked a moderate game but was a radical who had his eye on redesigning the free market and major American institutions. No, no cooed the “Obamacons” — he is at heart a moderate and a man of sophisticated philosophical views! Well, Brooks has helped settle the argument as to which side was right. The result is potentially disastrous for the nation’s economic health and political confidence.