The Princeton Alumni Weekly has an interview with the new president of the New York Public Library, Anthony Marx: "Marx likes to point out that Barack Obama found his Chicago community-organizing job in the mid-1980s at the mid-Manhattan branch's job bank."

The Daily Show's John Oliver has a pretty funny segment, embedded below, taking to task a columnist, Froma Harrop, who calls the Tea Party "terrorists" while simultaneously heading a "civility project" aiming to elevate the level of discourse. Link via James Taranto.

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A professor at Yale Law School, Jonathan Macey, has a piece in the Wall Street Journal defending private equity and pushing back against Robert Lenzner's article in Forbes that was mentioned here the other day.

Though I share Professor Macey's enthusiasm for capitalism and economic freedom, and I've admired his past writing about insider trading, I think Professor Macey takes his defense of private equity a bit farther than the facts warrant.

Professor Macey writes:

Because private-equity firms are, by definition, equity investors, they make money only if they improve the performance of their companies. Private equity is last in line to be paid in case of insolvency. Private-equity firms don't make a profit unless their companies can meet their obligations to workers and other creditors....

The Occupy Wall Street movement can't be too happy with this news article from the Associated Press. It begins, "It was only a few nights after the Occupy protesters began sleeping in his church sanctuary when Pastor Bob Brashears realized that his laptop was missing." And it goes on, "The security threat is very real here. At least 30 percent of the crowd is a mix of chronically homeless, drug-addicted people, some of whom suffer from "psychological issues," as several protesters put it delicately."

Lovely. First it was the 99% and the 1%; now it's the 30%.

The Boston Globe has a report on how Massachusetts taxes cellphone purchases at the full list price, even when the phones are discounted or free to consumers who sign up for a contract with a cellular provider. From the Globe:

"Why am I paying $40 tax on a $149 phone?" Worthington, a Worcester advertising executive, said she asked the Verizon Wireless sales clerk in Shrewsbury....

In Worthington's case, she was charged the state's 6.25 percent sales tax on her iPhone's actual value, $650. "That just drove me absolutely nuts," she said. "If I go in to buy a washing machine that's on sale, I don't have to pay sales tax on the full price."

The quarterly report to paying subscribers went out late yesterday afternoon. If you think you are a paying subscriber and did not receive it, please let us know via email ([email protected] works), and we'll check whether your subscription is up to date or whether it is expired. If you meant to renew or sign up but didn't get to it last month amid the flood of year-end solicitations and pitches, the "How To Help" page is still open for business, at an entry level price of less than $1 a week, and if you take care of it in the next day or two we'll make sure you get this most recent subscribers-only message. The link is here.

In his latest column, libertarian law professor Richard Epstein sets his sights on Elizabeth Warren, a law professor who is running for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts as a Democrat against Scott Brown, the Republican incumbent. Professor Epstein takes apart Professor Warren's statement that "There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there—good for you! But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did."

Writes Professor Epstein:

Arthur Laffer has a piece in the Wall Street Journal on the "Buffett Tax":

Mr. Buffett's donation to the Gates Foundation goes to the heart of my critique of his public call for higher tax rates on the rich. Just look at the second contractual condition for his ongoing pledge to the Gates Foundation: "The foundation must continue to satisfy the legal requirements qualifying Warren's gift as charitable, exempt from gift or other taxes."

In other words, if his gift weren't tax sheltered he wouldn't give it. So much for "shared sacrifice."

Mitt Romney's victory in the New Hampshire primary could be a wonderful thing for the country. What a resounding rejection by the Republican Party of the Michael Moore-style attacks on Mr. Romney by Newt Gingrich's SuperPac, by Rick Perry (who called Bain Capital "vultures that are sitting out there on the tree limb waiting for the company to get sick, and then they swoop in, they eat the carcass, they leave with that, and they leave the skeleton"), and even by Forbes' Robert Lenzner, a smart ex-Goldman Sachs guy who in a Forbes piece accuses Bain of engaging in "indefensible corporate rape." And who better to defend capitalism under attack than Mr. Romney, an actual successful capitalist who, in his victory remarks, promised "a clear and unapologetic defense" of "economic freedom"? Mr. Romney said he'd make the federal government "simpler, smaller, and smarter," that he'd "cut, cap, and balance the federal budget," and that his blueprint would be the Constitution.

"A Fine for Not Using a Biofuel That Doesn't Exist" is the headline over a pretty good New York Times news article highlighting the absurdity of a government effort to force gas companies to mix cellulosic ethanol into the fuel they distribute and sell. To blame is a law enacted in 2007, under President George W. Bush.

Factcheck.org, the Washington Monthly, and ABC News all fact-check Mitt Romney's claim to have created 100,000 jobs, including 90,000 at the office supply chain Staples, and none find it particularly credible. The Washington Post, which calls the claim "untenable," notes, "Left unsaid, of course, is all the jobs that might have been lost at small stationery stores unable to compete with the low prices of Staples, Office Depot and so forth."

In replacing White House Chief of Staff William Daley for Jacob Lew, President Obama is replacing Mr. Daley, whose final reported compensation as an executive at JPMorgan Chase reportedly included "a $675,000 salary for 2010, a roughly $3 million cash-and-stock bonus for 2009 and a $4.8 million bonus for 2010," with Mr. Lew, a Citigroup executive who was paid a bonus for 2008 of more than $940,000 on top of his regular compensation of $1.1 million.

So much for the idea that this White House has no private sector experience or is somehow biased against the bankers that Mr. Obama calls "fat cats." Both Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase took TARP money. Maybe Mr. Obama just doesn't like the bankers who aren't politically connected and don't leave their jobs to join his administration? Where's Occupy Wall Street when you really need it?

Mitt Romney's father George Romney is the topic of my weekly column this week: "Whether one believes the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, or whether one believes sons rebel against their fathers, there's a power to the notion that the careers of the fathers can tell us something about the characters of the son." Please check it out here at the New York Sun or here at Reason.com.

The Financial Times has a package of articles on "Capitalism in Crisis." One of the more intelligent contributions comes from Lawrence Summers, who observes: "It is not so much the most capitalist parts of the contemporary economy but the least – those concerned with health, education, and social protection — that are in most need of reinvention."

The Wall Street Journal has an editorial with a passage faulting Senator Santorum for wanting to expand the child tax credit:

Most disappointing is the Pennsylvanian's proposal to triple the tax credit for children (from $1,000 today), which is a hobby horse of the Christian right. This is social policy masquerading as economics. Unlike a cut in marginal tax rates, a larger tax credit does little for growth because it doesn't change incentives to save, work or invest. It merely rewards taxpayers who have children over those who don't.

Mr. Santorum is essentially agreeing with liberals who think the tax code should be used to pursue social and political goals. Yet a major goal of tax reform is to make the tax code less of a political free-for-all. The best tax code is one that raises the revenue the government needs with the least amount of economic harm and misallocation of resources.