So in an attempt to give myself a headache, I sat down one day last week to read the transcript of Rush Limbaugh's speech at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference. I would have just watched the video, but reading is faster — no need to pause for the rapturous applause.

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Here was Limbaugh, blaming the entirety of the economic crash on Barney Frank, Chris Dodd and Bill Clinton. The patron saint of "personal responsibility" believes his party, his movement so long in power, bears no responsibility whatsoever for our current economic calamity.

Right.

He also talked about how Obama has "created" an atmosphere of crisis. In other words, the worst economy most Americans have ever seen ain't a big deal; it's just that the "Democrat" Party wants you to think it is.

But the very centerpiece of his hour-long diatribe was that we have but two choices: "socialism, collectivism, Stalin, whatever you want to call it, versus capitalism." And capitalism itself, he wrote, is being "assaulted and our culture ... reoriented to where the people that make it work are the enemy."

The people that make it work. Hmm.

Would that include AIG chief Edward Liddy?

How about the CEO of Citigroup? He certainly made capitalism "work" — until he needed almost $50 billion of public capital to keep his private concern solvent.

Limbaugh wants to pretend our current crisis has nothing to do with capitalism. It has everything to do with capitalism.

If capitalism is as dynamic and creative as Rush says — and it is — it also harbors an inherent tendency to overreach. Go back through history, read not just about the Great Depression, but of the Depression of 1873, the Panic of 1837 — even the Dutch Tulip Mania of 1637. All were crashes triggered by speculation, bets that a rising market would keep rising — what Alan Greenspan called "irrational exuberance."

Rush likes to pretend the housing crash is all Barney Frank's fault. No way would banks have paired "creative" mortgages with risky borrowers without government pressure.

That's 100 percent wrong. Banks were tripping over themselves to get in on the game. Read about the collapse of Washington Mutual or Countrywide Financial and how executives at those companies saw subprime loans not as something they had to do, but as a growth strategy.

The toxic asset-backed securities that got us here — these didn't spring from the mind of some bureaucrat. They sprang directly from the creative capitalist mind as a means of generating wealth — recklessly, as it turned out. But who could have known?!

None of this, by the way, is an argument for a state-run economy. Because in one respect, Rush is right — the free market is a major reason why our country has been, and still is, so exceptional.

But when capitalism overreaches, as it does, it becomes the appropriate — and necessary — role of government first to rein it in, and then pick up the pieces.

Might there come a time when government overregulation stifles growth? You bet! And when that time comes, we can have that debate. But for now, there's plenty of "personal responsibility" to go around. Even for those who would foist it all off on somebody else.