Sometimes the best tax policy coverage in the New York Times is in the sports section. Today's reports on how France is all worked up because Monaco has been attracting excellent players in part because it has no income tax. The article ends with a quote from "Jérôme de Bontin, a former A.S. Monaco president who is the general manager of the New York Red Bulls":

Without the chance to earn much stadium revenue, Monaco is entitled to advantages elsewhere, de Bontin said. He attributed France's attitude to ingrained jealousy and suspicion.

"The socialist government seems to have targeted the rich," he said. "There seems to be this new philosophy in France that it's no longer a good thing to be successful."

The Park Avenue Armory, which is hosting an art exhibit featuring films of what the armory itself calls "graphic sexual acts," is offering conflicting information about whether state and city taxpayer dollars supported the show.

Writing in the New York Post's Wednesday edition, my friend and former colleague Seth Lipsky reported that an armory spokesman said no federal money funded the show, though tens of millions had gone to support the space it is in.

Yet at the exhibit on Wednesday, armory officials at the information desk in the lobby were distributing copies of the 2013 "Season Program," which, on the page devoted to the "WS" show by artist Paul McCarthy, states, "This installation is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the NYC Council." The program also lists Citigroup and Bloomberg, L.P. as season sponsors.

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein's column this week is about the government's data collection programs:

There is no escaping the fact that national security is an area where government may be appropriately feared, but is still desperately needed. Eternal vigilance is indeed the price of liberty. The solution is to work hard to maintain a proper balance, which cannot be done if the NSA collection and retention of data is regarded as an intolerable invasion of individual privacy rights, when at the present it is anything but that.

Support for New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's "Tax-Free New York" plan by the CEOs of JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and GE is the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here).

The Wall Street Journal has a dispatch about how the ObamaCare law is creating jobs for lawyers:

Last year corporate clients spent $5.72 billion on legal advice for regulatory matters, including health care, and the market is projected to grow to $6 billion this year, according to a recent survey of corporate legal spending by BTI Consulting Group Inc… good news for attorneys such as Les Johnson, a partner at Liles Parker PLLC, a 17-lawyer boutique based in Washington, D.C. A self-described "regulations dork," Mr. Johnson works out of the firm's Baton Rouge, La., office. He started out representing small clinics and nursing homes, then developed a specialty in Medicare appeals that earned him a national client base.

"The more they tinker with the federal regulations, the more work we have," said Mr. Johnson.

At the blog of the National Center for Public Policy Research, Jeff Stier writes that Waze, the Israeli navigation app company that Google is buying for approximately $1 billion, saves energy by guiding drivers around traffic jams. It's a great example of how privately built and financed technology can save energy by increasing productivity, as opposed to the approach of government regulation that attempts to save energy by limiting productivity or adding costs.

The box of kitchen matches covered here earlier with the California Proposition 65 warning that "Combustion of this manufactured product results in the emissions of carbon monoxide, soot and other combustion by-products which are known by the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects, or reproductive harm" has been named a finalist in the Center for America's 2013 Wacky Warning Labels contest.

Other finalists include a pedometer with the warning "company will not be held responsible for any illness or injury that is incurred while using the pedometer," a package of fishing lure rubber worms with the warning "not for human consumption," a bottle of eyeglass lens cleaner with the warning "not for contact lenses or direct use in eyes," and an extension cord with the warning "wash hands after using."

The National Archives today launched a new Web site, founders.archive.gov, that collects in one searchable place the annotated papers of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams (and family), Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison.

This will be useful for those trying to sort out bogus quotes attributed to the founders. Much of this material was already online at the Library of Congress, the University of Virginia, the Massachusetts Historical Society, or elsewhere, but this brings it all together. Sometimes the past sheds light on the future; see, for example, Thomas Jefferson's 1779 "Bill Against Usury."

Just received here, a statement related to the ongoing campaign by the American Federation of Teachers against groups that seek to reform the public pension system:

June 12, 2013

CLIFF ASNESS STATEMENT ON RECENT MEDIA REPORTS

The New York Post and Bloomberg News have reported that I intend to resign in the near future as a trustee of the Manhattan Institute. That is not true, and it should be corrected. I will continue to serve on the board because I share the Institute's respect for the power of liberty to better people's lives (which, of course, as for anyone in a similar position, does not translate to my sharing their every opinion). I will also continue to work in support of defined-benefit plans in order to ensure they play an important role in providing for the secure retirement of their beneficiaries, a vital national interest, and will carry on my long-standing advocacy for pension plan participants, individual savers and public trusts, even when this is contrary to entrenched Wall Street interests.

AQR SUMMARY

Bloomberg News has an article about the American Federation of Teachers "watch list" of money managers who donate to groups that support reform of defined benefit public pension funds, which we wrote about here earlier. "It's a means to shut up organizations," the article quotes Larry Mone, the president of one targeted non-profit organization, the Manhattan Institute, as saying.

The article includes this passage about Daniel Loeb, a hedge fund manager who at least so far has admirably resisted the pressure from the teachers union and its president, Randi Weingarten:

Weingarten says Loeb should address his conflict of interest.

After raising taxes on upper-income New Yorkers, Governor Cuomo now wants to reduce their ability to participate in the political process. The governor proposed today to lower the limit on the total amount that individuals can donate to statewide candidates in New York per race to $25,000 (or as little as $12,000 for candidates receiving public financing) from the current legal limit of $60,800.

Where are Jane Mayer of the New Yorker and William Cohan of Bloomberg News when you need them?

Those two, who were so worked up over the "censorship" and "chilling effect" and "erosion of constitutional freedoms" of David Koch deciding to come off the board of WNET and reconsider a gift after the public television station aired a documentary viciously attacking him and other residents of a building on Park Avenue and blaming them for poverty in America, have yet to be heard from when it comes to the American Federation of Teachers campaign against money managers who back research organizations critical of public pension funds.

The furor over the disclosure that technology companies gave customer data to the government's national security agencies is the topic of my column this week. Verizon offered an explanation to shareholders in its annual report to the Securities and Exchange Commission filed months before the Guardian article that triggered intensive news coverage. Please check out the column at Time magazine (here), the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here).

The bad idea of having state and municipal government use their eminent domain powers to restructure privately held mortgage debt is the subject of a new research paper from the New York Fed by Robert Hockett, a recent visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Why the Fed is still pursuing this when the housing market is recovering anyway with private investment without the use of eminent domain power is a mystery to me, but there it is.

In a Bloomberg View column, William Cohan rehashes the controversy over the PBS "Park Avenue" documentary and the Koch brothers, which was covered here earlier. The column is headlined "David Koch's Chilling Effect on Public Television" and concludes, "just like that, in this insidious way -- a film censored here, some phone records seized there -- the freedoms that we once took for granted and thought were guaranteed by our Constitution are slowly but surely eroded. This can't be a good thing."