At the top of today’s front page, the Washington Post joins other Big Media in dancing on the grave of capitalism and smaller government. And compared with such past headlines as “A Fresh Look at the Apostle of Free Markets” or “Crisis Turns Free Marketeers into Regulators,” the Post goes all the way: “The End of American Capitalism?” It does have a question mark.

But what is the Post’s evidence that “American-style capitalism” is a casualty of the financial crisis? Well, for one, “The Bush administration is considering a partial nationalization of some banks.” I’m not sure that an administration that has given us nationalized schools, expanded entitlements, burdensome Sarbanes-Oxley securities regulations (how’d those work out, by the way?), nation-building around the world, and a trillion-dollar increase in federal spending is exactly an example of free-marketers finally giving in to the lure of big government.

But it’s not just American politicians, the Post tells us, who have lost faith in capitalism. “European leaders … are calling for broad new international codes to impose scrutiny on global finance.” So the people who run the U.S. government and the people who run European governments are united in seeking more power for governments.

But wait, there’s more. “To some degree, those calls are even being echoed by the International Monetary Fund.” So even an intergovernmental organization devoted to forced wealth transfers also wants more power for governments.

Also Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz: “We told them if you wanted to be like us, here’s what you have to do — hand over power to the market. The point now is that no one has respect for that kind of model anymore given this crisis.” So the most left-leaning Nobel laureate thinks our policies should move to the left. But if reporter Anthony Faiola had interviewed such recent laureates as Vernon Smith, Ed Prescott, Robert Mundell, Gary Becker, Myron Scholes, Douglass North, or James Buchanan, he might have gotten a different answer.

There’s no question that the global financial crisis is causing people to question how well capitalism works. But we’re still not in any Great Depression. And the evidence in this article is almost entirely that governments are — as usual — taking advantage of a crisis to expand their scope and power.

Of course, if this crisis leads us to question “American-style capitalism” — the kind in which a central monetary authority manipulates money and credit, the central government taxes and redistributes $3 trillion a year, huge government-sponsored enterprises create a taxpayer-backed duopoly in the mortgage business, tax laws encourage excessive use of debt financing, and government pressures banks to make bad loans — well, it might be a good thing to reconsider that “American-style capitalism.”