"Facebook Reports a Loss" — headline, New York Times, July 26, 2012, reporting on a Facebook earnings report that for the second quarter of 2012 the company had lost $157 million according to generally accepted accounting principles.

"the company is making money" — claim in New York Times article "Facebook's Slide Continues," August 1, 2012, by the same Times reporter who wrote the July 26 piece.

Glenn Hubbard has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal offering Mitt Romney's economic plan.

As President Obama's director of the Office of Management and Budget, Peter Orszag was one of the leading pitchmen selling the idea that ObamaCare would "bend the curve" and slow the rise in the health care costs. Now that he's out of the administration and the law has been passed, he's actually acknowledging that growth in health care costs is slowing as a result of market forces, technological innovation, and the economy.

"Much of the recent deceleration is probably attributable to the economy," Mr. Orszag, now vice chairman of global banking at Citigroup, writes in a Bloomberg View column. Also, health-care providers are "are increasingly using computer software to inform clinical decision-making and are 'benchmarking' physicians — that is, comparing their practice norms with those of other doctors — to move toward better care."

Now he tells us.

This is a big deal, and amazing.

"The Economics and History of Cronyism" is the title of a new paper by David Henderson that has been issued by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. It concludes: "The more power the government has over the economy, the more allocation of resources will depend on political connections. The way to eliminate cronyism is to have free markets and little government control."

The CEO of the startup car-service operator Uber, which has been encountering obstacles from District of Columbia politicians and bureaucrats in the sway of the existing taxi industry, turns out to be an Ayn Rand fan, at least according to this Washington Post interview.

Frederick Van Bennekom, a FutureOfCapitalism community member who is a professional survey design expert at Great Brook, sends some thoughts on the latest New York Times-CBS News poll:

Notice how the pollsters' world views on these two questions affected the questions they asked.

19. From what you have read or heard, does Mitt Romney have the right kind of business experience to get the economy creating jobs again or is Romney's kind of business experience too focused on making profits?

20. Which comes closest to your view of Barack Obama's economic policies: 1. They are improving the economy now, and will probably continue to do so, OR 2. They have not improved the economy yet, but will if given more time, OR 3. They are not improving the economy and probably never will.

National Journal's Josh Kraushaar, writing about President Obama's decision to give Harvard law professor and Massachusetts Senate Candidate Elizabeth Warren a prime-time speaking slot on Wednesday night of the Democratic National Convention:

polls show about one-quarter of Obama supporters in Massachusetts are supporting Brown — the highest crossover total seen in any competitive Senate race this cycle....it's been a challenge for her to connect with many of the average Joes, in part because her background as an academic and government official. Unlike Romney, Brown has a well-worn reputation for connecting with those folks...in a worst-case scenario, sounding too strident could risk a Democratic version of Pat Buchanan's infamous 1992 convention speech, in which he argued there was "a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America." It was a hit in certain conservative circles, but a total flop with average voters.

Spending by federal, state, and local government in the U.S., including transfer payments "through programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment insurance, and housing vouchers," totaled $5.6 trillion in 2011, about 37% of GDP, says Donald Marron. That's down from a 2009 peak of 39% but up from earlier years in recent history.

Arnold Kling, commenting on John Taylor's observation that the Federal Reserve bought 77% of new federal debt in 2011, writes:

One side note is that some folks argue that the low interest rate on government debt is a sign that the government should issue more of it. This argument might be more persuasive to me if the Fed were buying a much smaller share. But the fact that the Fed is buying most of it says that (a) the markets do not necessarily agree with the low interest rate and (b) that as taxpayers we are not really benefiting from the low interest rate, since we are buying back (via the Fed) most of what we are issuing.

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein's latest column is about Judge Richard Posner, who ruled on the patent law case Apple v. Motorola and then published an article about the broader issue in the Atlantic:

The Posner decision looks doubly worrisome against the backdrop of his ominous Atlantic column, which shows his ill-concealed disdain for a complex industry with which he has had no direct engagement. It is an odd way to make patent policy....Let us hope that Posner's mysterious patent adventurism dies a quick and deserved death.

A graphic that goes along with a Wall Street Journal article on Harvard's budget divides Harvard's revenues up between "current-use gifts" and "endowed gifts." The graphic defines "current-use gifts" as "generally cash donations that can be spent down in entirety; for instance $100,000 to endow a named faculty chair, or graduate student travel and research."

Maybe prices have gone down, but last I checked endowing a named faculty chair at Harvard cost way more than $100,000, and Massachusetts law restricts spending down anything called an endowment.

Elizabeth Warren's Senate campaign ad urging America to catch up with China on infrastructure spending is the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at Reason (here) or the New York Sun (here). Rush Limbaugh mentioned the column on the air yesterday and the Examiner also did an item following up, as did Andrew Sullivan.

If I had to make a list of all the people in the world who might best understand the risks of appointing a special counsel to pursue crimes in the executive branch, it would probably start with Lewis "Scooter" Libby and Bill and Hillary Clinton and proceed to include Elliott Abrams. I admire and like Mr. Abrams and agree with him on many things, but I was surprised to see his post at the Council on Foreign Relations that seems to call for a special counsel to investigate national security leaks "out of the Obama administration" (the assumption is the leaks are from the administration rather than from Congress or Congressional staff). Mr. Abrams writes:

There are many issues here, but one of them is whether Democrats in Congress, and Democrats who served as officials in previous administrations, will take this intelligence crisis seriously. That means demanding a special counsel to investigate (rather than leaving it to an Obama partisan and subordinate like Eric Holder)....

The New Yorker has a long article about the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, Paul Ryan.

First comes this passage:

After his sophomore year in high school, back in 1986, he worked the grill at McDonald's. "The manager didn't think I had the social skills to work the counter," he said. "And now I'm in Congress!"

Then, a few paragraphs later, this one:

Ryan went back to Wisconsin, worked briefly for the family business as a "marketing consultant"—a bit of résumé padding that gave him his only private-sector experience—and decided to run...

Doesn't McDonald's count as private sector experience? Mr. Ryan has also spoken of his work "detasseling corn."

The Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, Paul Ryan, is out with a new one minute, 26 second YouTube video about the tax increases scheduled for 2013. It's not the most smoothly delivered video as these Ryan YouTube videos go, but it's a good indication of where the House Republican message and thinking is at this juncture.