My friend Eric Singer, manager of the Congressional Effect Fund, has urged me to devote some critical attention to the Yahoo! News site, which is where a lot of young people get their news, and which attracts nearly twice the Web traffic of NYTimes.com. This morning's gem is an opinion piece by a self-described conservative, Paul McDonnold, who describes Karl Marx's warning about the inevitable fall of capitalism as "prescient." Here is the conclusion:

One of the interesting phenomena to date about the Obama administration is how minimal the opposition has been to its policies of expanding government involvment in the auto industry, banking, and health care. Toward the end of this talk, law professor Richard Epstein speaks of what he calls a "surprising concordance of opinion," in favor of what he views as "disastrous policies on economic issues." With Democrats in control of both Congress and the White House, some of the usual checks and balances are missing. He speaks of what he calls an "implicit threat" to our "entire system of property rights" and urges, "people have to speak up against it."

Well, as Mr. Obama himself might say, change is on the way. Or at least the very early signs of it. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce yesterday announced what is reportedly a $100 million "Campaign for Free Enterprise:"

A former Bush aide, Karl Rove, has an article in today's Wall Street Journal advising Republicans on "How to Stop Socialized Health Care." His big concern is preventing the Obama administration from offering a "public option" as an alternative to private insurance for consumers or businesses.

"a public option will undercut private insurers and pass the tab to taxpayers and health providers just as it does in existing government-run programs. For example, Medicare pays hospitals 71% and doctors 81% of what private insurers pay," Mr. Rove writes. "Fixing prices at less than market rates will continue under any public option."

In the next breath he writes: "the public option is far too expensive."

On the face of it, there is an air of unreality about the statement today from the Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, on executive compensation. The American economy has lost more than 2 million jobs in the first four months of the Obama administration. And Mr. Geithner's big concern is that those Americans lucky enough to still have jobs might be making too much money? A lot of Americans would probably like to have that problem again.

The more you get into Mr. Geithner's statement, the more detached from reality it is. Mr. Geithner: "We will propose legislation giving the SEC the power to ensure that compensation committees are more independent, adhering to standards similar to those in place for audit committees as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act." As if those independent audit committees created by Sarbanes Oxley back in 2002 were such a big help in detecting off-balance sheet assets and overvalued on-balance-sheet assets at the big banks. As if.

The British magazine that calls itself a newspaper is less enthralled with President Obama than are the American news weeklies. We noted an earlier caution; here is the latest:

American business's next problem will be big government. One reason to worry is that there are few business people of any stature who have the president's ear, in sharp contrast to economists, lawyers, scientists, left-leaning politicians and union bosses...Bringing an enterprise tsar into the White House could change this, by ensuring that every time one of Mr Obama's other advisers suggests an intervention in the economy of any significance, he is at least forced to consider the question: 'What does this mean for business, and especially for the entrepreneurial culture that has for so long made the American economy great?'

One under-appreciated aspect of the interaction between business and government is the way in which big business often collaborates with the big government. A case in point is the account in today's Wall Street Journal of how the parent of Philip Morris USA is welcoming legislation that would have the Food and Drug Administration regulate cigarettes. The Journal reports:

Passage of the tobacco legislation will mark a big victory for Altria Inc., parent of Philip Morris USA, because it includes new restrictions on advertising and packaging that will make it difficult for other companies to gain attention for their brands.

Three American doctors have an op-ed piece in today's New York Times about "medical tourism" in which Americans go abroad for surgery that costs less than it would in America. The implication is that foreign countries may be delivering medical treatment more efficiently than America does. One point omitted by the article, however, is that medical tourism runs in both directions; foreigners who can afford to do so often come to America for what they think is the highest quality treatment. The Times itself noticed this in a front-page news article back in 2001, though it framed the matter in terms of American hospitals seeking high-paying patients from abroad; the Jacksonville Business Journal had an article in 2006 reporting that in the previous year, the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville had treated "about 1,400 foreign patients from roughly 95 countries." Thinking about health care not only in terms of cost but also in terms of quality is going to be an important part of the debate as the Obama administration presses for changes that would give the government a bigger role in the health care system.

John Maynard Keynes's biographer, Lord Skidelsky, attempts to referee the argument between Keynesian and neoclassical economists by suggesting that they may each be right for different moments. Writing in the Financial Times, he says, "Keynes's view was that we need different economic models at different times."

This rings both true and false. Sure, governments will want to adjust their policies based on the overall situation. It makes sense that the government might want to, say, increase defense spending in wartime but reduce it in peacetime, for example. But to the extent that economics is supposed to be a science that explains the workings of the world, the idea that it may operate differently at different times may seem strange. The laws of physics, or of astronomy, operate the same way regardless of whether the economy is expanding or contracting.

The Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, was up on Capitol Hill today testifying about the Treasury budget, and in his prepared remarks offered a glimpse of the super-regulator:

In the next few weeks, we will outline a comprehensive plan of reform that will include systemic risk regulations to ensure that no large and interconnected firm or market can take on so much risk that its failure could destabilize the entire financial system. The plan calls for bolstering consumer and investor protections. And it will streamline our out-of-date regulatory structure so that our regulatory system matches the size, shape and speed of our modern financial system. Together, these changes will help prevent another crisis of the magnitude that we have just lived through...

The Wall Street Journal has an editorial this morning calling on the Federal government to put Citigroup out of business as an independent entity "by either forcing it into a strategic partnership, if anyone will have it, or selling off its assets and breaking it up." Such a move, the newspapers editorialists argue, would be a "signal that regulators are starting to cull the weakest institutions in earnest, which could be good for confidence in the overall system." The editorial also argues that "Citi has proven itself unmanageable."

Elsewhere in the paper, the Journal reports that, following a conversion of preferred shares into common, the government will own "as much as 34%" of Citigroup, which "would make the government Citigroup's largest shareholder."

Bankers, politicians, and economists have taken to dreaming of a super-regulator as if it were a super-model. The latest example is an article posted last night on the Web site of the Financial Times by the president of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, Tim Ryan.

He writes:

we have endorsed the creation of a single financial markets stability supervisor, a central authority with oversight in all markets and of all systemically important market participants – regardless of charter, function or unregulated status. This stability supervisor must be given sufficient resources to collect data across markets and the ability to use it to take swift corrective action to prevent systemic instability. Never again should the failure of one or a handful of firms be allowed to threaten the viability of our economic system.

Pimco's William Gross, in his June market commentary, offers his take on the ideal marginal tax rate:

supply-side economics was a partial con job from the get-go. Granted, from the 80% marginal tax rate that existed in the U.S. and the U.K. into the late 60s and 70s, lower taxes do incentivize productive investment and entrepreneurial risk-taking. But below 40% or so, it just pads the pockets of the rich and destabilizes the country's financial balance sheet.

Why have the Canadian banks fared better than American or British ones in the financial crisis? New York Times columnist Paul Krugman asks and answers the question in this morning's column: "Consider the counterexample of Canada — a mostly English-speaking country, every bit as much in the American cultural orbit as Britain, but one where Reagan/Thatcher-type financial deregulation never took hold. Sure enough, Canadian banks have been a pillar of stability in the crisis."

Back in March, the chairman of Wells Fargo, Richard Kovacevich, called the Obama administration's plan for bank stress tests "asinine" and asked, "Is this America -- when you do what your government asks you to do and then retroactively you also have additional conditions?"

The new chief executive of Evercore, Ralph Schlosstein, offers the following assessment of the financial crisis in an interview published in today's Financial Times:

Wall St, business in general, even members of the Democratic party argued for a free market system, and we've found that completely unbridled animal spirit has risks. There was a too laissez- faire attitude about the risks in the system, and we also have to be equally cautious about swinging too strongly in the direction of over- regulation.

It's interesting to see Mr. Schlosstein joining the Economist in warning against going too far in the direction of socialism, or "over-regulation."