Mark Perry and Don Boudreaux offer some examples, from dental floss to Wal-Mart's low-priced prescription drugs.

The New York Times editorial writers have (finally!) found an area where "decisions must be the province of private enterprise, not intrusive lawmakers." The decision in question is how many General Motors and Chrysler dealerships to close and which ones. By the Times's narrative, "the companies decided that it was necessary to try to cut their losses and catch up with foreign competitors by selling cars through fewer dealers," while the House of Representatives is engaging in "political pandering." But, no matter what the Times claims, GM and Chrysler are not private enterprises in any meaningful sense of the term; GM is basically owned by the federal government and Chrysler was forced by the federal government into the hands of Fiat. The federal government fired GM's CEO and picked the new CEO. The federal government put tens of billions of dollars into both companies and their affiliated suppliers and finance arms after demanding restructuring plans from the companies. Those plans included closing dealerships. So the Congressional meddling that the Times is complaining about is not with real private enterprise or company decision-making but with the decision-making that the companies did working with the executive branch of the federal government.

Just in time for President Obama's push to expand government's role in health care, the Daily News has an investigation of "faked records and fatal blunders" at New York's city-government-run hospitals. One patient reportedly spent six days in the waiting room of the Kings County Hospital psychiatric emergency room.

We've noted repeatedly that the foreign press has been tougher on President Obama than the American press has. Here is the latest from Clive Crook, a columnist for the Financial Times:

Elected as a moderate, a centrist and a pragmatist, Mr Obama has repeatedly sided with the liberal left of his party on economic policy. The design of the fiscal stimulus, the shape of the budget, and Mr Obama's willingness at every turn to support higher spending and higher taxes on the better-off – to pay for health reform, social security reform, infrastructure investment, expanded educational opportunities, wage subsidies for the poor, you name it – has delighted the party's left and alarmed its centrists. The related charge of fiscal indiscipline is starting to stick, and it colours the health debate.

There's a tendency out there to attribute all of the increased government intervention in the private sector to President Obama. While he surely bears some of the resonsibility (as do President Bush and his treasury secretary, Henry Paulson), it's worth remembering that European politicians are to a large extent behaving, or at least talking, similarly. Here, for example, is a bit of an article from today on the Bloomberg wire:

"If bonus structures are irresponsible, banks will be made to hold more capital against them -- akin to a tax," Conservative leader David Cameron said on July 20. "The financial sector must understand that it cannot behave like the crisis never happened."

That's the British Conservative Party leader.

Obama's Tonsillectomy: FutureOfCapitalism.com Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal the following Monday.

Clifford Asness on Health Care: FutureOfCapitalism.com July 18 and July 22, the Wall Street Journal July 26.

Keith Hennessey has a detailed post arguing that the cost of private health insurance premiums will actually increase under the legislation under consideration by Congress.

Paris is trying to compete with London as a European financial center, the Financial Times reports. The idea seems to be that tax rates have something to do with attracting business:

One of Mr Sarkozy's first acts as president was to cut tax on the wealthiest by extending the so-called tax shield. The maximum a person pays in all taxes is now 50 per cent of income, down from 60 per cent. The cut has become more controversial amid the crisis but the president has refused to reverse it. Indeed, the government has gone further by improving the tax treatment of expatriate French or foreign employees posted to France.

At the same time, the British government has moved in the opposite direction, with a clampdown on tax treatment of non-domiciled residents and, from next year, a 50 per cent top rate of income tax on the highest earners. "The huge advantage that London had in taxation has pretty much gone," says [French Finance Minister] Lagarde. France has also abolished stamp duty on share transactions...

George Gilder's new book, The Israel Test, is getting the full promotional treatment from the center-right think tanks in New York and Washington: a Manhattan Institute event at the Harvard Club this week, a panel discussion next week at the American Enterprise Institute.

And why not? Mr. Gilder emerges in the book as an ardent defender of both Israel and capitalism, and, because he is not a Jew, the arguments avoid coming off as self-serving.

To hear Mr. Gilder tell it, Israel's fate is central to that of capitalism as a whole. "Just as free economies are necessary for the survival of the human population of the planet, the survival of the Jews is vital to the triumph of free economies. …The predicament of Israel is ultimately the predicament of world capitalism," he writes.

Israel needs all the defenders it can get, so one hesitates to quibble. Mr. Gilder's account of the technology boom in Israel is fresh, fascinating, well reported, and full of both scientific and personal detail.

If ABC News had really wanted to enliven that White House town hall meeting on health care (which I wrote about here and here and here) it could have invited its own correspondent John Stossel, who writes at Reason.com:

How do these arrogant, presumptuous politicians believe they can know enough to plan for the rest of us? Who do they think they are? Under cover of helping uninsured people get medical care, they live out their megalomaniacal social-engineering fantasies—putting our physical and economic health at risk in the process.

Will the American people say "Enough!"?

We've noted here and here and here that the foreign press seems less enthralled by President Obama than does the American press. The latest harsh assessment comes from the Economist, in a column headlined "The Cult of Obama." The column says, "Mr Obama is clearly not the socialist of Republican demonology, but he is trying to extend federal control over two huge chunks of the economy—energy and health care—so fast that lawmakers do not have time to read the bills before voting on them....because the Obama cult has stoked expectations among its devotees to such unprecedented heights, he is especially likely to disappoint. Mr Healy predicts that he will end up as a failed president, and 'possibly the least popular of the modern era.'"

We'll stipulate that pay-to-play system in which money managers give campaign contributions to public officials who then invest public pension funds with the money managers is problematic. But the Securities and Exchange Commission's new proposal to deal with it by imposing an outright ban on campaign contributions by money managers of public pension funds is an overreaction. It basically repeals the First Amendment rights of political participation for those engaged in the profession of managing money.

The SEC chairman, Mary Schapiro, cites as an example the ban on campaign contributions by municipal bond underwriters. But that rule, known as MSRB Rule G-37, is imposed by the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board, which, while created by Congress, is essentially a self-regulatory body. Of the 15 members of the board, five come from bank-dealers and five from securities firms. The SEC is a more conventional government regulator.

The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, apparently shares President Obama's sentiments about insurance companies and markets. Mr. Reid was on the Senate floor this week, and is quoted by Republican Senator DeMint (whose book I review here) as saying that "Allowing the market to work is code for letting the greedy insurance companies" deny care to sick and elderly Americans. Senator Reid has reportedly accepted $78,000 in campaign contributions from political action committees representing those same "greedy" insurance companies. Apparently his indignation at their greed doesn't extend so far as refusing to accept their money.

In its article this morning reporting Ford's first-quarter earnings, the Wall Street Journal reports that the automaker "refused U.S. federal aid." Bloomberg refers to the company as "the only major automaker to shun a U.S. rescue." In this week's Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes writes of the difference between what he calls "politicized capitalism" and "market capitalism," explaining:

The two types of capitalism exist in stark contrast in the American auto industry. General Motors and Chrysler have survived thanks to billions from the Obama administration and forgiveness of billions more in loans and other obligations. GM and Chrysler are now wards of the federal government, which picks their CEOs, names their boards, and can tell them which cars to manufacture.

Is it just me or do you get the sense that President Obama, deep down inside, doesn't really like or respect the private sector of the economy? In tonight's press conference, he said he'd like to see those in the financial industry feel "remorse" and "shame" and "not give million dollar bonuses." He said a public option was needed for health insurance to "help keep the insurance companies honest," in addition to more regulations on the insurers. (Why not a public option for department stores to keep the retailers honest? Or a public option for amusement parks to keep Disney World honest?) He noted that there had been recent reports of "insurance companies making record profits" and asked plaintively, "what's the constraint on that?" He even accused pediatricians of being motivated by greed, conjuring up a tale of one pediatrician who, confronted with a child with a sore throat, reacted by thinking "You know, I'll make a lot more money if I take the kid's tonsils out." The president accused Americans of being cynical about government, but Mr. Obama himself sounded pretty cynical about those Americans who don't work in government. For all Mr. Obama's good humor, as when he joked about what might happened if the police caught him trying to break in to the White House a la the Henry Louis Gates event in Cambridge, there's a dark view underneath there about capitalism and human motivations that is at odds with some of Mr. Obama's more inspired statements about the prosperity and innovation spawned by capitalism.