WORKERS OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE. Just not yet.

So happy birthday, Communist Manifesto--although I'm hoping that capitalism survives this one, if only because there's no alternative ready at hand.

The columnist has a charming faith in Wise Experts.

At the very least, we should get some regulation and serious oversight out of any bailout deal, meaning that, yes, the economy will look a little less like "free enterprise." But one thing we should have learned in the last week, if not the last year, is that, when applied to enterprise, "freedom" can be just another word for someone else's pain.

Yes, freedom of contract includes the freedom, not to say the responsibility, to walk away from deals that sound too good to be true. That caution is ubiquitous in Tyler Cowen's summary at Marginal Revolution of what went wrong in high finance.