Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum sharpened their attacks on Mitt Romney in this morning's Republican debate, with Mr. Gingrich calling Mr. Romney "a relatively timid Massachusetts Massachusetts moderate" peddling "pious baloney" with the help of his "millionaire friends," and Mr. Santorum saying Mr. Romney "wouldn't stand up for conservative principles."

After Mr. Santorum asked if Mr. Romney had done such a great job as governor of Massachusetts, why didn't he run for re-election, Mr. Romney replied, "for me, politics is not a career."

Mr. Gingrich interjected, "Could we drop a little bit of the pious baloney?" He said to Mr. Romney, "You've been running consistently for years and years and years...You've been running consistently since at least the 1990s."

Jon Huntsman also joined the attacks on Mr. Romney: "He criticized me, while he was out raising money, for serving my country...This nation is divided, David, because of attitudes like that."

Anyone who supposes that government overreach is a recent residue of, say, the Obama administration, or even of FDR's New Deal, or of the Progressive era in the early 20th Century of American politics may want to check out this letter from the December 7, 1850 Times of London, which I stumbled across in the course of some research this afternoon:

There was published in The Times of 7 December 1850 (too late to be used in the above-named work, which I issued in the last week of 1850), a letter dated from the Reform Club, and signed "Architect," which contained the following passages:

Lord Kinnaird recommends in your paper of yesterday the construction of model lodging-houses by throwing two or three houses into one.

Allow me to suggest to his Lordship, and to his friend Lord Ashley to whom he refers, that if,—

1. The window tax were repealed,

2. The building Act repealed (excepting the clauses enacting that party and external walls shall be fireproof),

The Center for Public Integrity isn't always my cup of tea, but its article out today on GE's subprime lending activities is worth a look. The Center's Michael Hudson has interviews with eight former staffers of WMC Mortgage Corp., which was acquired by GE in 2004. After the acquisition:

GE asked Amy Brandt to stay on. She added CEO to her title. Internal documents obtained by iWatch News indicate GE promised the 31-year-old executive as much as $20 million in compensation over three years — including a $10 million upfront bonus at the closing of the deal.

General Electric declined to answer questions from iWatch News about the acquisition. It won't say how much scrutiny it gave the lender before it closed the deal, or whether it was aware of WMC's earlier fraud problems.

The New York Sun has an editorial about the Federal Reserve's decision to start publishing forecasts of its own behavior:

The idea seems to be that the Fed is going to publish not only its own forecast of interest rates but the forecasts of its individual policy makers. It reminds us of the wiseacre who asked Freddie the Fixer which nag was going to win the classic known as the Galloping Mile. Freddie answered him with his famous tautology: "I haven't decided yet."

David Brooks, in his latest New York Times column:

If you believe in the dignity of labor, it makes sense to support an infrastructure program that allows more people to practice the habits of industry. If you believe in personal responsibility, you have to force Americans to receive only as much government as they are willing to pay for. If you believe in the centrality of family, you have to have a government that both encourages marriage and also supplies wage subsidies to men to make them marriageable.

If you believe in the dignity of labor, it may make sense to oppose an infrastructure program that would forcefully extract, through taxation, money earned through labor and give it to politicians and lobbyists to dispense for pet pork-barrel projects like bridges to nowhere built by overpaid union contractors and dressed up with the name "infrastructure."

The Wall Street Journal gets cooperation from Washington Post CEO Donald Graham and Facebook Mark Zuckerberg for a story on their relationship. The article portrays it as mutually beneficial. It's certainly a newsworthy topic, and I read every word of the piece. But there are some questions that go unasked or unanswered. From the Journal:

At their first meeting at the Post offices, Mr. Zuckerberg explained his then-dorm room business and Mr. Graham recalled having "a very strong reaction."

He immediately tried to invest. "It was the only time in my life that I thought to make a venture investment," said Mr. Graham.

Although the investment in Facebook didn't work out in the end (another party offered Mr. Zuckerberg more money), the two bonded over the future of their businesses.

The article doesn't say whether this prospective investment was by Mr. Graham personally or by the Washington Post Company.

Diana Furchtgott-Roth compares Mitt Romney's and Rick Santorum's tax plans:

Santorum would cut taxes across the board. The top individual rate would decline to 28 percent from 35 percent now. Small businesses owners who currently file as individuals would see their tax rates decline. Santorum would halve the corporate tax from 35 percent now to 17.5 percent, so firms would do better filing as corporations rather than as individuals.

Manufacturers would have a corporate tax rate of zero. Naturally, this would encourage companies of all stripes to describe themselves as manufacturers. ...

Santorum would end estate taxes and reduce the long-term capital gains tax (for holdings of more than a year) and dividends from 15 percent now to 12 percent. ...

Romney would not lower taxes to the same extent. He has not promised cuts in personal tax rates, as have Santorum, Perry, Huntsman, and Gingrich. Individuals, and small businesses filing as individuals, would still be subject to a maximum rate of 35 percent. ...

To the long list of issues on which President Obama told voters one thing during the 2008 campaign and has done something different as president, add two more. One is the size of the army. From Mr. Obama's 2008 presidential campaign literature: "Barack Obama supports plans to increase the size of the Army by 65,000 troops and the Marines by 27,000 troops. Increasing our end strength will help units retrain and re-equip properly between deployments and decrease the strain on military families." From today's New York Times: "Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta has concluded that the Army has to shrink even below current targets, dropping to 490,000 soldiers over the next decade...White House and Pentagon officials sought to portray Mr. Obama, who has been criticized by the Republican presidential candidates as weak on national security, as deeply involved in planning for the new strategy.' He has led this review process personally,' said the National Security Council spokesman, Tommy Vietor."

A few additional points to add to last night's post on the Iowa primary:

There are now two teams, or informal alliances, forming up. Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum are aligned. Mr. Gingrich praised Mr. Santorum in his speech last night — "he waged a great, positive campaign" — while criticizing Mitt Romney — "a Massachusetts moderate....pretty good at managing the decay." Mr. Gingrich said Iowans "weren't millionaires...weren't from Wall Street...didn't have a superPAC" — all jabs at Mr. Romney. Mr. Gingrich is angry at the negative advertising Mr. Romney and his allies dumped on him. Mr. Gingrich went so far as to call Mr. Romney a "liar." Mr. Santorum is right now Mr. Romney's biggest enemy, and under the enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend theory, Mr. Gingrich wants to help Mr. Santorum. Also, the longer Mr. Gingrich can delay a Romney coronation, the longer his own hopes for the nomination survive.

The big news of the Iowa caucuses is the surge of Rick Santorum. What does it mean?

Part of it is just good timing. His surge was late enough that he hasn't yet been subject to the wave of press scrutiny and attacks from rivals that the other candidates were subjected to when they showed up high in the polls.

But it also means that there is a constituency in the Republican Party who appreciates a candidate who was willing to take on Ron Paul on foreign policy. Senator Santorum was the only one who did that consistently in the debates, taking a hard line against Islamic extremism in Iran and challenging Congressman Paul when Mr. Paul tried to suggest that American pull back from its overseas commitments. Mr. Santorum, a Catholic, was also consistent in speaking about the importance of family values in policy. I've also commented in the past about Mr. Santorum's immigration position:

The Winter issue of National Affairs is out, and one of the highlights is an article by a professor at Columbia Business School, Charles Calomiris, that runs under the headline "How To Regulate Bank Capital":

NPR has a piece on Washington State, where the statewide minimum wage, at $9.04 an hour, is the highest in the country:

There's even a theory that the state minimum wage — which is counted separately from tips — might explain the understaffing and lousy service at some Seattle restaurants. It's Economy 101: The more you raise the price of something — employment, in this case — the less of it there'll be.

"I don't think there's any sensible economist who thinks you could double the minimum wage and not throw a lot of people out of work," says David Neumark, director of the Center for Economics and Public Policy at University of California, Irvine. There is a debate, he says, over the effect of incremental raises for the small group of largely unskilled workers who earn the minimum wage.

"The consensus from a lot of studies I've surveyed — including my own — says that a 10 percent increase in the minimum reduces employment of those very low-skilled groups by about 1 to 2 percent," he says.

At the end of a column about Rick Santorum, David Brooks makes the following observation about Barack Obama and Mitt Romney: "The country doesn't want an election that is Harvard Law versus Harvard Law."

Mr. Romney has a degree from Harvard Business School, too, but the point stands.

An year-end update of the Crony Capitalism Index is the topic of my weekly column this week. It reports on several members of the President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness who have laid off workers while their companies' share prices have plunged. The piece is up here at Reason.com and here at the New York Sun.

This new movie about Margaret Thatcher, The Iron Lady, is attracting some attention. FutureOfCapitalism reader-participant-watchdog-community member-content co-creator William N. Walker writes: