Mitt Romney's election night victory speech in Florida was another example of the sort of glaring contradiction he's in the habit of — like falsely accusing President Obama of cutting $500 billion from Medicare while simultaneously accusing Mr. Obama of trying to turn American into a European-style social welfare state. Tonight's whopper was this line: "Like his colleagues in the faculty lounge who think they know better, President Obama demonizes and denigrates almost every sector of our economy."

A professor at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, John Cochrane, has a blog post up about a paper about 19th-century usury laws limiting the interest rates that could be charged by lenders. Professor Cochrane writes:

Here are just a few of the fun facts.

The states have the power under the constitution to regulate firearms, the Second Amendment notwithstanding, libertarian law professor Richard Epstein writes in his latest column on the Hoover Institution Web site: "the Constitution, at least as originally conceived, was as much a compact among the states as it was a compact with the people. Apart from the stirring "we the people" in the Preamble, the rest of the document is largely concerned with structural matters that continue to retain great importance. Libertarians should be concerned not only with individual rights, but also with the institutions needed to protect them."

Bloomberg View is back this morning with the second installment of a column we posted about yesterday, about finance and art. From this second column, which is also by the chair of the department of religion at Columbia University, Mark Taylor: "Each week brings another account of a newly rich hedge-fund manager buying art at a ridiculously inflated price."

Paul Ryan's House Budget Committee is out with a press release about a new Congressional Budget Office report on differences between federal government employee compensation and private sector employee compensation:

• Overall, federal civilian employees receive total compensation that is 16 percent higher than their private-sector counterparts;

• Federal civilian employees receive 2 percent more in cash wages than private-sector employees;

• The most significant advantage comes in the form of benefits, where federal civilian employees enjoy a 48 percent advantage over their private-sector counterparts.

The Budget Committee notes that while President Obama is proposing a raise for federal workers (beyond the step increases they already get for seniority), House Republicans are proposing a pay freeze for federal civilian employees and for members of Congress.

If Newt Gingrich loses the Florida primary, the reason won't be money, it will be problems with his message of "Occupy Wall Street Republicanism" and with the candidate himself. That's the point of my column this week. Please check it out either at Reason.com (here) or at the New York Sun (here) or both places.

To judge by the comments on the piece posted here the other day about Mitt Romney and the taxation of carried interest, not everyone has been fully convinced. Maybe this article by J. William Dantzler Jr., a tax lawyer at White & Case, will do a better job of explaining it. He asks:

Do we really want a tax law in which only people who already have money can earn a capital gain? And, if earning a capital gain requires an investment, then how much? Does it have to be a big investment? Can it be borrowed from the other partners? Isn't a carried interest in effect just a loan from the moneyed partners?

The comments on the Dantzler article are worth a look, too. Bloomberg View should get some credit for running the article after its editorial campaign for raising capital gains taxes on managers of investment partnerships.

A professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego, Valerie Ramey, has a new paper out titled Government Spending and Private Activity: "In most cases private spending falls significantly in response to an increase in government spending." Increases in government spending do reduce unemployment, but "virtually all of the effect is through an increase in government employment, not private employment."

One thing I learned as a newspaper editor is that if you have to phrase the headline as a question, the answer to the question is probably "no." Such is the case with a Bloomberg View column that runs under the headline, "Is Modern Finance Ruining Modern Art?"

The author of the column, the chair of the department of religion at Columbia University, Mark Taylor, writes about the relation between art and money: "During the past several decades, however, this relationship has been transformed by the appearance of a new form of capitalism: finance capitalism. In previous forms of capitalism -- agricultural, industrial and consumer -- people made money by buying and selling labor and material goods; in finance capitalism, by contrast, wealth is created by circulating signs backed by nothing other than other signs."

As opposed to the diplomas that Columbia is issuing?

The long shadow of usury rears its ugly head yet again.

The Economist has a "leader" — British for a leading article, or what Americans call editorials — on Greece:

What is the best way out of this mess? Step one is to force private bondholders to take more losses. They have been treated with kid gloves so far because European governments insist the debt deal must be voluntary, thanks in part to a misplaced fear of triggering credit-default swaps. That must change. Discard the veneer of voluntarism and Greece can be tougher on its creditors. It should pass a law that retroactively introduces collective-action clauses into all domestic-debt contracts (making it easier to impose debt deals on recalcitrant bondholders). If it does this now there is still, just, enough time to organise a big, coercive, but orderly, restructuring of Greek bonds by March 20th.

The most popular article this morning on Yahoo! News is a piece about an academic study. "Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found," is the way the article put it. Not a single person identified as a social conservative is actually quoted in the article, and the article's definition of a social conservative — "Social conservatives were defined as people who agreed with a laundry list of statements such as 'Family life suffers if mum is working full-time,' and 'Schools should teach children to obey authority' — seems subject to challenge.

The four remaining Republican presidential candidates debated again tonight in Florida, moderated by CNN's Wolf Blitzer.

My favorite exchange came when Speaker Gingrich was questioned about his proposal to colonize the moon, including the idea that if 13,000 Americans lived there they could apply for statehood. Mr. Gingrich said "look back at what JFK said," remembering how President Kennedy had inspired a generation.

Mr. Romney accused Mr. Gingrich of pandering to voters in Florida, home of the Kennedy Space Center. "Politicians go from state to state and promise exactly what the state wants to hear," Mr. Romney said.

My second-favorite answer was the one Rick Santorum gave when asked how his religious beliefs would impact his decisions in the presidency. All four of the candidates had a turn to answer the question, but I thought Senator Santorum's answer about how the Constitution exists to protect "God-given rights, not government-given rights," was by far the best.

Donald Marron reports that on January 1, 2013, capital gains taxes are scheduled to go up sharply from the current 15% rate:

First, the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts are scheduled to expire. If that happens, the regular top rate on capital gains will rise to 20%. In addition, an obscure provision of the tax code, the limitation on itemized deductions, will return in full force. That provision, known as Pease, increases effective tax rates on high-income taxpayers by reducing the value of their itemized deductions. On net, it will add another 1.2 percentage points to the effective capital gains tax rate for high-income taxpayers.

And that's not all. The health reform legislation enacted in 2010 imposed a new tax on the net investment income of high-income taxpayers, including capital gains. That adds another 3.8 percentage points to the tax rate.

To judge by this editorial in Mortimer Zuckerman's New York Daily News, add Mr. Zuckerman to the list of billionaires — Warren Buffett, Michael Bloomberg, Rupert Murdoch — who want to change the taxation of carried interest, more than doubling the current rates for long term gains by managers of real estate, oil and gas, venture capital, private equity, and hedge fund investment partnerships. As the post here the other day, "Seven Myths About Romney's Taxes," said, this isn't about how little guys get treated compared to billionaires. It's rather a case "of some billionaires wanting to raise taxes, not on themselves, but on other billionaires and multi-centimillionaires who compete with them for deals, for investment capital, for talent, and in the contest of wealth accumulation."

The New York Times has both a news article and an opinion piece on ROSLA, neither of which even mention the teachers union issue raised here. It's an example of the paper not giving its readers the full story.