"Investors are right to worry that inflation could return, even if the Fed's massive bond purchases in recent years have not brought it about," Harvard economist Martin Feldstein writes.

The Daily Telegraph has a dispatch on Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad's decision to return to Sweden:

Mr Kamprad, who built Ikea from a shop in his garden shed selling watches and Christmas cards, is one of Europe's wealthiest men. He left Sweden in the 1970s in protest at the country's high taxes, setting up residence in Switzerland.

"At that time, the tax regime was very restrictive," Ikea said.

But Sweden's centre-right coalition government has chipped away at the country's generous welfare system during its nearly two terms in office, trimming income taxes and abolishing a wealth tax.

Another useful reminder that capital is mobile and that it responds to public policy incentives.

Thank you to those who have already responded to our quarterly drive for paying subscribers. For those who weren't sold by yesterday's list of Ten Reasons To Become a Paying Subscriber, here are ten more reasons to click through and sign up:

1. Nobody else keeps an eye on Warren Buffett like we do.

2. The money from subscriptions helps make it possible for us to promote the site and help to grow its readership.

3. The entry-level subscription is about a quarter of the price of a subscription to the online New York Times, and FutureOfCapitalism will take and waste less of your time than the Times would.

4. Even after the Dodd-Frank financial "reform" act and the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure (CARD) Act, you can still pay for a subscription with a credit card.

5. A FutureOfCapitalism coffee mug?

No hats or sunglasses inside the bank, please.

If a city wants to pass a law banning hats or sunglasses inside banks, that is one thing, but for a bank to put up a sign proclaiming that the police and the bank together are asking customers to remove the banks is another thing. I suppose a law is mandatory, while the sign is just making a request, which customers are free to ignore and see what happens. Customers are also free to choose a different bank that doesn't have a sign like that in the window, which is what I will do.

The Ford Foundation, a tax-exempt group with approximately $10 billion in assets and with at least two employees who earned more than $1 million in total compensation in 2011, has given a "generous grant" to the Economic Policy Institute to fund a slick new Web site, Inequality.is, featuring a YouTube video narrated by Robert Reich talking about how the North American Free Trade Agreement is bad, taxes should be higher, and rich people have "rigged" the system to their own advantage.

Whatever one thinks about income inequality, the notion of a $10 billion tax-exempt foundation paying its executives more than $1 million a year spearheading a public campaign for higher taxes and against outsized executive pay is pretty classic.

Our quarterly drive for paying readers is going on this week. Thanks to those who have already joined or renewed existing subscriptions. Here are ten reasons to become a paying member or subscriber.

1. You need to reallocate all the money you saved by canceling your New York Times subscription after Paul Krugman wrote that September 11 "has become an occasion for shame."

2. Might as well spend whatever money you have left now before President Obama taxes it away. If you spend enough, you might even avoid counting as one of the "millionaires and billionaires" for Obama tax-raising purposes.

3. You enjoy and learn from the content of FutureOfCapitalism.com and want to send an encouraging signal of support.

4. At the entry level of just $49 a year, it's less than 14 cents a day, which is an unbelievable bargain for what is being provided.

5. Your money will be used to help improve FutureOfCapitalism.com and to expand its audience.

Bjorn Lomborg has a column in USA Today reacting to President Obama's speech about energy and climate change. Writes Mr. Lomborg: "As long as green energy is much more expensive than fossil fuels, it will always remain a niche, subsidized by rich countries to feel good. But if innovation makes future green energy sources cheaper than fossil fuels everyone will switch."

An official of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. provided some testimony today before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs that detailed how, during the Obama years, the federal government has taken over the business of student loans. Federal student loan originations have grown to more than $100 billion a year in each of the past three years from about $70 billion in the 2006-2007 school year, while "in contrast," the private student loan market has shrunk considerably over the same time period, with originations peaking at about $23 billion in the 2007-2008 academic year before falling to about $8 billion per year in the past three academic years.

Here's a legislative issue where libertarian law professor Richard Epstein and Ruth Messinger, the left-liberal former president of Manhattan who is now the president of the American Jewish World Service, are aligned: the Royce-Engel amendment that would have allowed 45 percent of American food aid abroad to flow as cash rather than as American crops delivered on American-flag ships manned by unionized American sailors. Professor Epstein's weekly column has the details, which, though obscure, are fascinating as the story of how a program billed as "foreign aid" has turned into a program to help American farmers and unions.

From a New York Times news article about two New York City Department of Sanitation employees who were fined and retired from the agency after reportedly soliciting and accepting tips of $5 each from a city resident who left out more than a usual amount of curbside garbage:

According to SeeThroughNY.net, which lists New York municipal salaries, each man earned over $100,000, including overtime, in 2011.

The sanitation workers apparently had some accumulated seniority — one had been on the job since 1986, another since 1990. In years with a lot of snow, sanitation workers in New York do well with overtime. Even so, though, and even in New York City in 2013, wages of more than $100,000 for front-line sanitation workers seem high by private-sector standards for this sort of work, and probably contribute to New York's high taxes.

A political action committee backed by New York hedge fund managers David Shaw and James Simons is pouring money into the U.S. Senate race in Massachusetts for ads depicting the Republican candidate as a "Wall Street insider" who "supports tax breaks for billionaires." The Senate race and the attack ads are the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at Reason here or at Newsmax here.

FutureOfCapitalism.com would not exist without the support of paying members and subscribers. If your subscription is up for renewal, you will get an email soon asking you to re-up. Please do. And if you haven't yet joined, if you appreciate this site and the ideas you find here, please become a paying subscriber or member. Paying readers help sustain this site, and they also receive special subscriber-only quarterly newsletters from the editor about the site's progress. The entry-level price is a lot cheaper than a Bloomberg subscription, and the news and opinion skews less left-wing. The link is here. Thanks in advance.

Also in the Summer Issue of National Affairs, Jeffrey Anderson and Jay Cost have an article on how to redesign the Republican presidential nomination process:

Any successful reform effort must …shift the balance of power to the party's grassroots. People who live on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and contribute money to Republicans, people who live in Northern Virginia and do polling for the party, and Democratic-voting members of the mainstream media should not have considerably more say than the average Republican voter…

The new Summer issue of National Affairs carries an article by George Will about religion and politics. Mr. Will, who writes that he counts himself among the 20 percent of Americans who say their religious affiliation is "none," nonetheless writes:

A nation such as ours, steeped in and shaped by Biblical religion, cannot comfortably accommodate a politics that takes its bearings from the proposition that human nature is a malleable product of social forces, and that improving human nature, perhaps unto perfection, is a proper purpose of politics.

Biblical religion is concerned with asserting and defending the dignity of the individual. Biblical religion teaches that individual dignity is linked to individual responsibility and moral agency. Therefore, Biblical religion should be wary of the consequences of government untethered from the limited (and limiting) purpose of securing natural rights.

One of the great things about America — and in particular its cities — is the way people from a wide variety of backgrounds live together. One way to illustrate it is this photo of the door buzzers on a Brooklyn apartment building that I happened to walk past the other morning.

One can argue that it's antidiscrimination laws that force landlords to rent, or owners to sell, apartments without regard to the religion, race, or national origin of the tenants. But I think bigger factors are the property rights and voluntary exchange of capitalism, along with the American idea that whether your name is Chin, Yeo, Borrero, Nathanson, Landman, or Paschetto, so long as you want to be here and agree to live under the laws, you are just as much an American as anyone else.