FutureOfCapitalism.com on NPR's endorsement of a Cuban-style health care system: September 13, 11:23 p.m. Slate's Mickey Kaus on the same topic: September 14, 6:23 p.m.

Niall Ferguson, writing in the Financial Times, concludes: "If only we had learnt from Lehman that no bank should be 'too big to fail', we might still have a real capitalist system, instead of the state-guaranteed monstrosity that is the real legacy of last year's crisis."

That is a colorful sentence. If there's room to quibble it's that in many ways America even before the crisis fell short of a "real capitalist system," because of all the many ways that government intervenes and distorts markets. In some ways, the crisis just made many of those implicit and hidden subsidies more explicit and transparent. It's tempting for critics of the interventions that have taken place in the final year of the Bush administration and the first year of the Obama administration to idealize what came before that, but it wasn't exactly laissez faire.

Highlights of Treasury Secretary Geithner's interview this morning with Diane Sawyer on "Good Morning America":

When Ms. Sawyer declares that a year ago, "G.E. was going to fail" (now there's a question you aren't going to get on the "Today" show, which is owned by G.E.'s NBC unit), Mr. Geithner responds by saying, "We were never going to let it get to that point." If that doesn't amount to an implicit government "too big to fail" stamp of approval on General Electric, it's hard to know what would.

"Yet the government's efforts are the primary reason the housing market is functioning at all, economists and housing experts say, which makes an exit unlikely any time soon," reports an article in today's Wall Street Journal. Not the Nation magazine, the Wall Street Journal.

The best paragraph of President Obama's speech today:

I have always been a strong believer in the power of the free market. I believe that jobs are best created not by government, but by businesses and entrepreneurs willing to take a risk on a good idea. I believe that the role of the government is not to disparage wealth, but to expand its reach; not to stifle markets, but to provide the ground rules and level playing field that helps to make those markets more vibrant -- and that will allow us to better tap the creative and innovative potential of our people. For we know that it is the dynamism of our people that has been the source of America's progress and prosperity.

Also noteworthy is that he acknowledges some of the blame for the crisis belongs not to bankers but to Washington: "It was a collective failure of responsibility in Washington, on Wall Street, and across America that led to the near-collapse of our financial system one year ago."

The Atlantic's Ronald Brownstein, described by Bill Clinton as "one journalist who generally gets it right," has an article up comparing the George W. Bush and Clinton economic records and concluding:

For another view that differs with the self-congratulatory, "catastrophe averted" story-line of today's Wall Street Journal front-pager, check out President Clinton's labor secretary, Robert Reich. "The mega-bailout of Wall Street accomplished little. The only big winners have been top bank executives and traders, whose pay packages are once again in the stratosphere....A few banks like Goldman have officially repaid their TARP money but look more closely and you'll find that every one of them is still on the public dole. Goldman won't repay taxpayers the $13 billion it never would have collected from AIG had we not kept AIG alive....Meanwhile, Goldman is still depending on $28 billion in outstanding debt issued cheaply with the backing of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Which means you and I are still indirectly funding Goldman's high-risk operations."

The Wall Street Journal, in a front-page retrospective on the financial crisis, writes, "With a modicum of hindsight now available, do governments and central banks deserve credit for preventing catastrophe? The early verdict from most scholars, executives and government insiders is yes."

The "Modern Love' column in Sunday's New York Times is about a man who, with his wife, owns "a light-filled, two-bedroom, two-bath place in a doorman building" in Manhattan, but has kept a rent-controlled apartment that he uses as an office (even though he has other offices) and as a storage unit. The article is framed in terms of what it all means for the romantic and personal relationship between the man and his wife, but to us the more interesting angle is how quickly a government-price-control policy aimed at assisting the needy becomes an entitlement open to abuse by the upper-middle class. Rather than helping to solve the housing shortage, the price controls exacerbate the housing shortage by encouraging people to take up more space in the city than they would if they had to pay market rates for the space.

National Public Radio aired a story Friday about a Twitter contest to reduce health care policy to three words. It gave some examples, such as "Stop Eating McDonald's" and "Quality Affordable Coverage." Then NPR's Robert Siegel said, "Our staff made up some three-word policy proclamations: Doctors Make Less and Cuban Health Care."

The afternoon of President Obama's health care speech, I started writing this post:

One thing to look for in President Obama's speech on health care tonight will be whether he mentions Senator Edward Kennedy, and, if he does, whether he frames the mention as a tribute to Kennedy the bipartisan compromiser (for which, see some of the references in my Forbes.com piece about Kennedy, and also David Brooks's New York Times column on Kennedy as "The Great Gradualists) or Kennedy as the uncompromising idealist (see the Wall Street Journal editorial).

After months of operating in stealth mode, it's been nice this week to lift the veil on FutureOfCapitalism.com. National Review has mentioned us twice on its Web site (in The Corner and on its Media Blog). The New York Sun had an item, as did the New York Daily News and Politico. Please help spread the word about FutureOfCapitalism.com by telling your friends about the site.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 -- eight years ago today -- targeted not just the U.S. government at the Pentagon and all the police and firefighters who were killed that day, but the World Trade Center, Jay Richards reminds us at the blog of the American Enterprise Institute.

For more of Osama Bin Laden's view of capitalism, see his tape of September 2007:

Those with real power and influence are those with the most capital. And since the democratic system permits major corporations to back candidates, be they presidential or congressional, there shouldn't be any cause for astonishment - and there isn't any- in the Democrats' failure to stop the war. And you're the ones who have the saying which goes, "Money talks." ...

Writing in The Times of London, Daniel Finkelstein remembers the business manager of the Beatles, Brian Epstein, and interprets the Beatles as a triumph of capitalism. He also says high tax rates may have caused the band's breakup:

the Beatles are as much a triumph of commerce as of art. They were not merely brilliant musicians fusing avant-garde influences with rhythm and blues music. They were a showbiz act managed by an inspired entrepreneur. They weren't simply class rebels against the Establishment, they were the brilliant product of capitalist enterprise, the early pioneers of globalisation....In his recent book Magical Mystery Tours (a wonderful insider memoir) Bramwell argues that it was penal tax rates that helped to destroy the group's cohesion.

(Link via Mark Perry's Carpe Diem blog.)

In an editorial this morning about illegal immigrants and health care, the New York Times declares, "The bills before Congress declare illegal immigrants to be ineligible for subsidized benefits. It is impossible to imagine any final bill doing otherwise."

Well, as Rep. Joe Wilson would say, "You lie!"

Alvin Rabushka, a senior fellow at the right-leaning Hoover Insitution who is best known for his advocacy of the flat tax, writes, "In his address to Congress (September 9, 2009), President Obama stated that illegal aliens would not be eligible to participate in his health insurance plan. One reason for all citizens to have insurance is to cut costs by curtailing emergency room use by the uninsured. The exclusion of illegals from his plan leaves some 10-15 million illegals still dependent on emergency rooms. Won't the exclusion raise the costs Obama says his plan will curtail?"