"The anticapitalist ethos that's become increasingly fashionable in the wake of the financial crisis," is mentioned by Eliza Gray, writing in the Wall Street Journal. The description may strike some as an overstatement, because a lot of capitalism's enemies don't openly proclaim themselves as such. But it's a trend worth exploring for those who believe, as Ms. Gray writes, that capitalism is the economic system best adapted to human nature.

Here is the 79-19 roll call vote by which the Senate decided to impose a $10-a-tourist tax on foreign visitors to America (who can't vote against the Senators who are taxing them) and to use the money for an industry-run tourism advertising campaign. An earlier FutureOfCapitalism.com post about the issue is here; the Heritage Foundation blog calls it "The Mickey Mouse Bailout Act" and "another victory for corporatism over the free market and the American taxpayer." It's interesting that Heritage, a right-wing think tank, is now using "corporatism" to mean something bad. They sound like Ralph Nader. Or like the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which thundered this morning against "Big Pharma."

President Obama's comparison of his "public option" for health care with public colleges and universities is a flawed one, Gerald Prante argues at the Tax Foundation's blog.

Mr. Obama: "public colleges and universities provide additional choice and competition to students without in any way inhibiting a vibrant system of private colleges and universities."

Mr. Prante: "Public colleges and universities not only rely on billions of dollars in government subsidies (which he says the public option would not receive), public colleges and universities do indeed crowd out private colleges, largely because of these subsidies. For a California resident, UC-Berkeley (probably the best public university in the nation) is indeed a lower-priced substitute for Harvard University."

In a column on the Bloomberg wire, Jonathan Weil hands out "awards for taking principled stands under fire" to those few he calls "good guys." At the top of the list:

Dick Evans, chief executive officer, Cullen/Frost Bankers Inc. He said no to the government's bailout money. Of the 24 companies in the KBW Bank Index, San Antonio- based Cullen/Frost was one of three that declined to participate in the Treasury Department's Troubled Asset Relief Program. Many banks applied for TARP funds because their bosses thought the government was forcing it on them...Other banks that refused TARP funds include People's United Financial Inc. of Bridgeport, Connecticut, and Commerce Bancshares Inc. of Kansas City, Missouri.

It's not all that often you see the New York Times standing up for property rights and dynamism against government regulation. So it's nice to see the Times's architecture critic, Nicolai Ouroussoff, take the New York City Planning Commission to task for requiring that the developers of a site in Midtown Manhattan lop 200 feet off of a planned skyscraper. Mr. Ouroussoff warns of "a mentality that, once it takes hold, risks transforming a living city into an urban mausoleum." New York's historic districts are some of its loveliest neighborhoods, not mausoleums. And the city's planning commissioner, Amanda Burden, is one of the most likeable persons around, certainly not hostile to development. But Mr. Ouroussoff is on to something with his unease with the decision by government to prevent the owner of the property from building a tall tower. The owner bought the property knowing there were zoning restrictions on it. There are cases to be made that good zoning laws create value over time, though reasonable people may disagree about the issue. Whatever your view on zoning laws overall, though, there is something unusually tangible about seeing how those zoning restrictions can destroy value when an individual skyscraper is cut short by 200 feet.

FutureOfCapitalism.com, September 9, 2009, 6:27 a.m.

The idea that the Democrats lost control of Congress as a kind of punishment for failing to pass health care is a strange one. If voters were angry that health care failed, why would they put in Republicans, who were the ones who blocked it, rather than the Democrats, who at least tried to pass it? A more common explanation is that in 1994 the voters were punishing Democrats for attempting an overly ambitious and secretive goverment takeover of the health care system. By that explanation, it wasn't the failure to pass health care that voters were punishing in 1994, but the effort to pass it. That explanation is one that comes with different lessons for today's Democrats.

Karl Rove, The Wall Street Journal, September 10, 2009:

President Obama is a gifted orator, and beyond that, he is a smart guy with sensitive political antennae. He did a fine job in his big speech tonight of articulating some of what is wrong with the health care financing and delivery system in America, and he was correct to sense the need to step back and address, toward the end of his speech, not only the specific issue of health care but the broader issue of the role of government in society. There, he acknowledged that it is one of the strengths of America that it prizes self-reliance and rugged individualism and has a healthy skepticism of government. He acknowledged that "government could not and should not solve every problem." But he also said, "the danger of too much government is matched by the peril of too little."

Senator Grassley, the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, is out with a statement (not yet posted online) in advance of President Obama's health care speech, and it is a pretty good barometer of where the middle-of-the-road Republicans in Congress are on the issue. Mr. Grassley is not at all averse to imposing new government regulations on health insurance companies. He thinks the government needs to protect consumers from these companies: "insurers should be prohibited from denying coverage or charging exorbitant rates for pre-existing conditions and from imposing annual and lifetime limits on benefits. Stronger consumer protections should be enacted."

But Mr. Grassley is wary of more government spending, saying, "People question whether the deficit-financed stimulus bill passed last winter did any good. They don't think the Federal Reserve's bailout efforts are working for them. Big banks and even automakers have been essentially nationalized, the deficit is forecast to be more than $9 trillion over the next decade, and working Americans don't see how giving the government a bigger role in health care makes any sense."

The Goldman Sachs Web site has the text of the spech the firm's CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, gave today in Frankfurt. It's interesting to see him straddle the line between calling for more government regulation and cautioning against too much of it. Here, he calls for more regulation:

regulators need to more regularly and proactively engage market participants. We should get more questions from regulators like, "Where are standards slipping or policies being stretched? Where are pressures building up? And, where are you seeing concentrations in risk?"

Here, he warns against too much regulation:

The Economist has an article on whether it is "speculators" who are responsible for spikes in oil prices, and whether trading positions in oil futures should be limited by the government, as the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Gary Gensler, has suggested. The article concludes that the evidence for blaming speculators and for limiting positions, is weak. "It is tempting to look for scapegoats when high prices hurt consumers. But the real culprits for oil-price volatility may be much more familiar: supply, demand and global instability."

A tax on soda and other sugary drinks is "an idea that we should be exploring," President Obama tells Men's Health magazine. The Bloomberg wire manages to pass along the comment without any reference whatsoever to Mr. Obama's pledge in the first presidential debate and repeatedly during the course of the campaign, "if you make less than $250,000, less than a quarter-million dollars a year, then you will not see one dime's worth of tax increase." Mr. Obama has already raised tobacco taxes, so maybe he meant that if you make less than $250,000 a year and don't smoke or drink soda or Gatorade, you won't see one dime's worth of tax increase. But that's not what he said during the campaign. The New York Times has already come out in favor of a sugary drink tax, though, as FutureOfCapitalism.com wrote earlier, it hasn't explained what is particularly nefarious about drinks loaded with sugar as opposed to say, cupcakes, or cotton candy, or other sugary treats that are constituted as solids rather than liquids. Or, even, say newspaper food sections that encourage the consumption of those items.

"To compete and win in a globalized world, no one needs the burden of health insurance shifted from business to government more than American business," Thomas Friedman writes in his New York Times column today. Mark us down as unconvinced. How is government going to pay for this burden of health insurance? By taxing businesses and by taxing individuals who own businesses or shares of them or who are customers of them. Yes, America's health care costs made it more economically sensible for General Motors to build some cars in Canada, which has a government health care system. But in Canada, tax revenue in 2006 was 33.4% of GDP, versus 28.2% in the United States, according to the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development. That's five extra percentage points of GDP that belong to the government rather than being available to private businesses and individuals to invest or spend. If you carry Mr. Friedman's argument to its logical extension, business would benefit, too, if government would pick up the burden of paying employee salaries. That doesn't mean it is good public policy. None of this is to defend the American practice of providing health insurance through employers. But replacing the provision of health insurance through employers with the provision of health insurance through the government is not a policy shift that would necessarily be an unalloyed win for American competitiveness, either.

From the lead front-page article in this morning's New York Times comes the following analysis of why a health-care overhaul is likely to become law: "Politically, there is an imperative for Democrats to act; they remember well the disastrous political fate that befell them in 1994, when they lost control of the House and Senate after failing to pass a health bill under President Bill Clinton."

The idea that the Democrats lost control of Congress as a kind of punishment for failing to pass health care is a strange one. If voters were angry that health care failed, why would they put in Republicans, who were the ones who blocked it, rather than the Democrats, who at least tried to pass it? A more common explanation is that in 1994 the voters were punishing Democrats for attempting an overly ambitious and secretive goverment takeover of the health care system. By that explanation, it wasn't the failure to pass health care that voters were punishing in 1994, but the effort to pass it. That explanation is one that comes with different lessons for today's Democrats.

Writing in today's Wall Street Journal, the American Enterprise Institute's Peter Wallison says, "piling yet more responsibilities on the Fed raises the question of whether we are serious about discovering incipient systemic risk. If we are, then an agency outside of the Fed should be tasked with that responsibility....If we are going to have a systemic-risk monitor, it should be an independent council of regulators."

Mickey Kaus, in a recent post, made reference to his "recent, not uncommon, experience with rising credit card rates." Sure enough, in my mail came a letter from a credit card company -- actually, a large British bank -- informing me that the new penalty annual percentage rate on my card will be "the Prime Rate plus a margin of up to 26.99%" Said the letter, "Based on the Prime Rate as of August 1, 2009 the current Penalty APR would be up to 30.24% corresponding to a Daily Periodic Rate ("DPR") of .0828%"