Congratulations to President Obama, who early in January made courageous recess appointments, long blocked by Republicans in the Senate, to name Richard Cordray director of the newly formed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and three new members of the Labor Relations Board. The appointments defied Republican refusals to confirm the nominees in hopes of keeping the agencies from functioning.

The appointments will likely face a constitutional challenge, but they were worth the risk. Cordrey’s appointment finally allows the agency created last year to begin protecting consumers from abuses by payday loan companies, the student loan industry, mortgage brokers and other credit-related operations. The NLRB will be able to get back to work now that it has the quorum that allows it to function.

To digress, the one and only time I drove a dog sled was a few years ago in the early spring as the weather was warming. The first part of the trip took us over a brushy path just wide enough for the dogs and sled to pass. It had already undergone a few days of melt and freeze. The dogs were exhilarated, running full tilt, and I hung on to the back of the sled, bouncing over rocks, sliding sideways on icy patches, and alternately grinning and yelping nearly as exuberantly as the dogs. Then the sled hit a boulder and tipped, and I went flying off into the brush.

I sat up in time to see the dogs and sled careen around the next corner of the trail without me. Luckily or, rather, intelligently, the trip leaders had staged sleds ahead of and behind mine. The sled behind picked me up, the crew ahead caught the dogs, and we were all united in about 10 minutes. Happily for me, most of the rest of the trip took us down wide, old logging roads and across a nice flat, icy lake, where boulders were not lying in wait.

I’m not sure one can compare those sled dogs with Chinese Chairman Mao Zedong’s running dogs of capitalism, but in the metaphorical world, one can try. Here we are careening around economic corners, skidding on unemployment, ricocheting off a boulder-sized housing bubble and flying off into the recessionary brush—and the capitalist running dogs just keep doing what they do—they run. And many of us are left behind.

Unfettered capitalism, for all of its exuberant energy and forward movement, isn’t the perfect system in a society that wants to stay on track, make steady progress and keep from occasionally being flung out into the deep brush. Under-restrained capitalism, with one percent of the wealthiest Americans owning about 37 percent of the nation’s wealth, can leave an awful lot of people behind. This is not a sustainable venture.

We’ve seen government policy in Republican and Democratic administrations support corporations sending American jobs overseas in droves. We’ve recently watched unregulated financial institutions cause a stock market meltdown that decimated consumer confidence and a mortgage scam that left homes in foreclosure and families out in the cold. We keep being told that government policy to continue cutting taxes for the rich will enable them to create jobs, and the trickle-down theory will work for us all. But hasn’t that fantasy scenario about run its course?

It would seem that fanatically opposing higher taxes for the rich and skewing the capitalistic system to benefit corporations, as opposed to workers, just keeps tossing more and more Americans into the economic bushes.

Shouldn’t government’s goal be to make economic opportunity more available to everyone—by helping low-income children to escape poverty, by funding projects that pay crews to rebuild the country’s crumbling infrastructure, by supporting a new health care system that will keep workers, children and seniors healthy, and by protecting the public from scams?

While we were all raised to believe capitalism could raise up any citizen who was willing to work for success, in its increasingly unfettered state, it has instead let loose the dogs of greed. It’s time for government to rein in those running dogs. Someone up the trail needs to restrain them, and someone needs to come from behind and pick up the folks who’ve been thrown out into the bushes.

Good for President Obama. But no president is going to do this work without continuous support, public pressure, and 99-percent-type protest from the rest of us. We’re going to have to create a louder voice than the one percent. Let’s not be the ones to let the dogs run loose. Goodness knows they’re way out around the bend now.