The White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, is famous for observing, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." His latest highly quotable aphorism, according to those who are repeating it, is "Capitalism is too important to be left to the capitalists," a take-off on Clemenceau's statement that "war is too serious a matter to entrust to military men," or, more colloquially, "war is too important to be left to the generals." It's a witty and perhaps slightly disarming formulation, but it might leave you wondering whether, under that formulation, government officials who believe in capitalism still count as capitalists. This is the same Mr. Emanuel who made $16.2 million in his two-and-a-half year stint as managing director in the Chicago office of Wasserstein and Perella.

From the editorial in the September 28 issue of the Nation: "The great hope that swelled with Barack Obama's election is in danger of curdling into disappointment and anger. Too many outrages have accumulated without convincing responses from the government. Too many grand prospects are shriveling into small-bore results." It's an under-appreciated fact, but one with political and policy implications, that President Obama has opposition on the left as well as on the right.

A new Gallup poll finds 45% of Americans think there is "too much" government regulation of business and industry, while 24% think there is too little. The same poll finds 57% think "government is trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses," while 38% think "government should do more to solve our country's problems."

Byron York of the Washington Examiner and Senator Jim DeMint pointed the way to this one. The poll is based on phone interviews with 1,026 adults. The Gallup site has historical data, too.

In an intriguing Bloomberg column, Matthew Lynn names what he says are the winners and losers of the recession: historians over economists, Germany over Britain, frugality over extravagance, hedge funds over banks ("the lightly regulated, cash-rich hedge funds will grow in importance, while the tightly controlled, capital- constrained banks stagnate") and right over left. It may be hard to see a government takeover of banks and automakers (with health care maybe on the way) as a victory for the right, but Mr. Lynn tries to make the case: "Lenin would have led the overthrow of a dozen governments presented with an opportunity like this. But his heirs on the left failed to advance any cogent arguments. Nor did they develop any alternatives to free-market, finance-led capitalism...Center-right parties will remain in power, as in Germany or France, or recapture it, as in Britain. And it will stay that way for a long time." This seems to overlook American politics. But Americans often make the error of overlooking European politics, so Mr. Lynn's argument may be a useful corrective. Still, when Warren Buffett is hailing three government employees -- Ben Bernanke, Henry Paulson, and Timothy Geithner -- as the crisis's "heroes," it's hard to see it all as a victory for "free-market, finance-led capitalism."

Our item on the federal investigation of Humana: September 21, 12:36 p.m.

Instapundit's item on same topic: September 21, 5:58 p.m.

The Wall Street Journal's editorial on the same topic: September 22.

The chief of the National Economic Council, Lawrence Summers, writes on the White House blog: "the most important economist of the twenty-first century might actually turn out to be not Smith or Keynes, but Joseph Schumpeter. One of Schumpeter's most important contributions was the emphasis he placed on the tremendous power of innovation and entrepreneurial initiative to drive growth through a process he famously characterized as 'creative destruction.' His work captured not only an economic truth, but also the particular source of America's strength and dynamism." Interesting stuff. Mr. Summers writes all this to contextualize a speech of President Obama. The closest Mr. Obama came to mentioning Schumpeter's name was a reference to the "tremendous leadership" of "Senator Chuck Schumer, who couldn't be here today." Alas, about all that Mr. Schumer and Schumpter have in common is the first five letters of their last names. No mention in the speech of "creative destruction," either. Just a lot of justification of government programs. "The private sector generally under-invests in basic science. That's why the public sector must invest instead," Mr. Obama said. He made the case for government investment by saying that the government investment in the Erie Canal was "what led a pretty good inventor and a pretty good businessman named Thomas Edison to come to Schenectady and open what is today a thriving mom-and-pop operation known as General Electric." In fact Edison did most of his innovating in West Orange and Menlo Park, New Jersey, not in Schenectady, notwithstanding the government's investment in canal technology that has since been made obsolete by railroads and interstate highways (admittedly, another government investment). The Library of Economics and Liberty has more on Schumpeter, who was a fan of capitalism but warned it would be replaced by socialism. In fact, some of Schumpeter may be more relevant than either Mr. Obama or Mr. Summers quite realizes. Here is one particularly nifty, if perhaps overly pessimistic, quote:

The Tax Foundation is out with a new analysis of what the impact of President Obama's taxing and spending proposals would be, finding that the policies "will increase the number of families who are net "receivers" of federal government spending -- those who get more back than they pay in taxes -- from 60 percent of families under today's policies to 70 percent. This means the 'givers,' or those who pay more in taxes than they receive in spending benefits, will shrink from the top 40 percent of families today to the top 30 percent by 2012." As the distribution of this redistribution shifts, you start getting into some interesting questions about taxation without representation and the consent of the governed. We got into some of these questions here in the review of Senator DeMint's book.

In a Bloomberg column, John Dorfman wonders why shares of Humana, which he owns for "many" of his clients, are trading for only seven times earnings. "The low valuation, I believe, is based on investors' fears about government interference and possible price controls in the health-care field," he writes. Mr. Dorfman says the stock seems cheap and that a health-care-law overhaul could actually benefit Humana, which he describes as "the second- largest provider of health-care benefits backed by the U.S. Medicare program." The company itself apparently is not so confident of the outcome; the Associated Press reports that the company sent its customers a mailing warning them "if the proposed funding cut levels become law, millions of seniors and disabled individuals could lose many of the important benefits and services that make Medicare Advantage health plans so valuable." Senator Baucus responded by ordering up a federal investigation of the company, the AP reports, which suggests that the investors' fears about government interference may not be entirely groundless. If this health-care overhaul happens, it's hard to believe that everyone is going to come out of it a winner.

"The Federal Reserve Board has rejected a request by U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner for a public review of the central bank's structure and governance," Bloomberg News reports in an article that quotes a defender of the Fed's decision as saying "The Fed was created by Congress and it is not part of the executive branch." In fact, Mr. Geithner's boss, the president, appoints the chairman of the Federal Reserve, and had Mr. Geithner considered the review of the Fed a high priority he might have tried to prevail upon President Obama to make Chairman Bernanke's submission to such a review a condition of his reappointment. That opportunity was apparently missed. Some see the Fed's independence as a strength, insulating decisions on monetary policy from political meddling. Others see it as a weakness, allowing important economic policy decisions to be make by unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats. Mr. Geithner has been an advocate of giving the Fed more power to regulate companies that are systemically important; the Fed doesn't seem particularly grateful, or if it is, it sure has a strange way of showing it.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman criticizes President Obama for defending bankers against having their pay singled out. The president had said, "Why is it that we're going to cap executive compensation for Wall Street bankers but not Silicon Valley entrepreneurs or N.F.L. football players?" Writes Mr. Krugman:

That's an astonishing remark — and not just because the National Football League does, in fact, have pay caps. Tech firms don't crash the whole world's operating system when they go bankrupt; quarterbacks who make too many risky passes don't have to be rescued with hundred-billion-dollar bailouts. Banking is a special case — and the president is surely smart enough to know that.

Charles Krauthammer looks at the way the high expectations for President Obama may constrain his rhetoric, or shape the popular response to it, in ways different than President Clinton: "Slickness wasn't fatal to 'Slick Willie' Clinton because he possessed a winning, near irresistible charm. Obama's persona is more cool, distant, imperial. The charming scoundrel can get away with endless deception; the righteous redeemer cannot." It may look that way in retrospect, but a lot of the same people who are now complaining about Mr. Obama now didn't find Mr. Clinton particularly charming, either, back at the time. It's also interesting to see a column written about presidential deception without any reference to George W. Bush, who managed in a way to meld the righteous redeemer and the charming scoundrel personality types, and who was accused of lying over and over again by Paul Krugman and by various anti-war protesters. Yet another example of how quickly things can change.

The Weekly Standard has a collection of links about Irving Kristol, who died Friday. James Q. Wilson has a piece in Monday's Wall Street Journal that makes a broader point: "If neoconservatism does have any principle, it is this one: the law of unintended consequences. Launch a big project and you will almost surely discover that you have created many things you did not intend to create. This is not an argument for doing nothing, but it is one, in my view, for doing things experimentally. Try your idea out in one place and see what happens before you inflict it on the whole country."

FutureOfCapitalism.com spoke recently with the president and ceo of the Pacific Research Institute, Sally Pipes, as part of a series of interviews we have planned in the coming days and weeks with experts on health-care policy experts. Ms. Pipes is author of The Top Ten Myths of American Health Care.

FutureOfCapitalism.com began by mentioning that the picture of the American health care system drawn by President Obama can be pretty bleak, with costs soaring and cancer patients being dropped by their insurance companies. Is our health care system in good shape or bad shape?

The New York Times has a big front-page article today about how "runoff from all but the largest farms is essentially unregulated by many of the federal laws intended to prevent pollution and protect drinking water sources." As we've noted, when the Times uses the word "unregulated" the subtext seems to be that regulation is needed, which seems to be the Times's view of every profession and industry except for that of print journalism, which somehow, miraculously, seems to function without it. A similar view is expressed by an Associated Press article highlighted this morning on Yahoo! News, which appears under the headline, "AP IMPACT: Gov't stands by as mercury taints water." The AP story begins, "Abandoned mercury mines throughout central California's rugged coastal mountains are polluting the state's major waterways, rendering fish unsafe to eat and risking the health of at least 100,000 impoverished people. But an Associated Press investigation found that the federal government has tried to clean up fewer than a dozen of the hundreds of mines — and most cleanups have failed to stem the contamination."

Paul Krugman's New York Times magazine article on the failings of economics has John Cochrane of the University of Chicago really riled up. Professor Cochrane has written an attack on Professor Krugman, who he says "wants to be Rush Limbaugh of the Left." In between the economics and the press criticism, there are some valuable thoughts about policy of the sort we are interested in here. Professor Cochrane:

The case for free markets never was that markets are perfect. The case for free markets is that government control of markets, especially asset markets, has always been much worse.

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