Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein has a piece up at the Hoover Institution Web site that expands on his PBS NewsHour interview from the other day:
As was said long ago by Justice Pitney in Coppage v. Kansas, "it is from the nature of things impossible to uphold freedom of contract and the right of private property without at the same time recognizing as legitimate those inequalities of fortune that are the necessary result of the exercise of those rights." So why uphold this combination of property and contract rights? Not because of atavistic fascination for venerable legal institutions. Rather, it is because voluntary exchanges improve overall social welfare.
The New York Times (here) and the Wall Street Journal (here) have coverage of a driving while intoxicated arrest of the president of the New York Public Library, Anthony Marx. Less interesting to me than whether he was drunk driving is the car that was involved — a 2009 Audi that the newspapers say is owned by the library and that the president apparently uses to drive himself around.
The New York Public Library is a wonderful institution, one of the real jewels of New York City, and I have benefited personally from using its resources for my own research.
The news from last week that President Sarkozy called Prime Minister Netanyahu a liar to President Obama, and that Mr. Obama, rather than defending Mr. Netanyahu, complained about having to deal with him every day, is finally seeping out this morning. But as newsworthy as the insight it provides into international politics is the insight it provides into what might be called the media-political industrial complex. From the Reuters dispatch:
The conversation was not initially reported by the small group of journalists who overheard it because it was considered private and off-the-record.
The surprising lack of coverage may be explained by a report alleging that journalists present at the event were requested to sign an agreement to keep mum on the embarrassing comments. A Reuters reporter was among the journalists present and can confirm the veracity of the comments.
Holly Petraeus's testimony before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs about how car-dealers, electronics retailers, and for-profit colleges are bilking military families is the topic of my weekly column, which is up at Reason.com: "Her statement offers a glimpse into the mindset of an administration that seems to view just about every private enterprise other than politically connected 'green' energy companies as rapacious, every commercial transaction other than Energy Department loan guarantees as exploitative." The link to read the full column is here.
Bill Clinton has an interview with USA Today to promote his new book, Back To Work. Highlights from the interview:
"What really happened, in my opinion, in 2010 is what happened in 1994," he says. "People — they don't want too much government, but they want enough. If they think the Democrats are giving them too much, they'll vote for the Republicans to get a little less … They looked at the stimulus and the financial rescue and the auto bailout and all that stuff that happened, and they said: 'A little too much; we want a little less.' "...Clinton also urges fellow Democrats to "saddle up" on tough budget issues such as roping in Social Security and Medicare spending.
"Speaking Candidly, Journalists Are Truly Snakes" is the headline on this Michael Kinsley column published by Bloomberg News: "one anonymous source can be turned into half a dozen different people. She can be a 'White House official,' and 'one person who attended the meeting,' and 'a source high in the administration' and 'a person familiar with the administration's thinking' -- all in the same article."
In 20 years as a journalist at a lot of different publications, I've never engaged in that deception of readers as a reporter, approved it as an editor, or even heard of it being practiced by a colleague. If Mr. Kinsley has, it's almost enough to make a reader wonder if the "snakes" in the headline include Mr. Kinsley himself. Credit him for letting readers in on the secret now, I suppose, but some specific examples of this sort of thing would be something.
A contingent from the Occupy Boston "Occupy" protest camp marched late yesterday afternoon to the building that houses the Israeli consulate in Boston and held a brief sit-in in the building's lobby. Video is here and embedded below.
According to the Twitter feed of @kade_ellis, chants included, "hey hey, Ho ho! Israeli apartheid's got to go!," "long live the intifada! Intifada intifada!," "not another nickel! Not another dime! No more money for Israel's crimes!," and "Viva viva Palestina!"
The governor of Texas, Rick Perry, has released a negative YouTube video ad aimed at one of his opponents for the Republican presidential nomination, Mitt Romney. The ad focuses on Governor Romney's position on TARP. I was against TARP but am neutral in the fight between Perry and Romney. I'm embedding the ad below just because I think it's newsworthy.
A reader-watchdog-content co-creator-participant-community member passed along a piece about Occupy Wall Street by Richard Brodsky, a Democrat who served in the New York State Assembly from 1983 to 2010. Mr. Brodsky writes, "Forty years ago lots of folks, myself included, were part of an effective, hierarchical set of movements that changed the world."
The Brodsky essay isn't particularly illuminating, but I do think this nostalgia on the left for 1971 can be helpful for the rest of us in understanding the present moment. After all, a lot of us remember the 1970s as a time of stagflation, urban decay, crime, and a decline in American global prestige.
The other piece, from a different end of the ideological spectrum, that reminded me of 1971 is this essay by Henry Hazlitt, titled The Future of Capitalism. It was published in 1971. I was unaware of the essay when I picked the name for this Web site, but it's a wonderful essay, just as relevant now as when it originally appeared 40 years ago. It begins, "At the present time the outlook for capitalism is far from hopeful. This is not owing to any inherent defects of capitalism considered as a system, but to the fact that great evils and injustices are attributed to it and that its merits are so little understood. As a result it is being maligned, thwarted, sabotaged, and slowly regulated to death."
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has an op-ed in USA Today explaining his plans. "By the end of my first term, I will bring federal spending as a share of GDP down from last year's staggering 24.3% to 20% or below," he writes.
There are many things government does that we may like but that we do not need. The test should be this: "Is this program so critical that it is worth borrowing money to pay for it?" The federal government should stop doing things we don't need or can't afford. For example:...Enact deep reductions in the subsidies for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Legal Services Corporation....Repeal the Davis-Bacon Act, a union giveaway that artificially raises costs for government projects, and save taxpayers more than $10 billion a year in the process....Social Security benefits for higher income recipients should grow at a slower rate than for those with lower incomes.
The Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, Paul Ryan was on MSNBC this morning. In the two minute, 23-second video embedded below, Mr. Ryan, who is one of the brightest Republican lights criticizes President Obama for stoking resentment and "class division," "pitting people against each other." Moments later, Mr. Ryan says, "let's stop subsidizing the wealthy. Let's stop subsidizing their health and retirement benefits."
Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein writes about President Obama's jobs bill that its strategy "is to take money out of the private sector and put it into government. The substitution will not be on a dollar-for-dollar basis, because the bill's transitional tax provisions will impose large costs on the economy. The upshot is that there is in fact a huge chance that the loss of private sector capital caused by this bill will see the elimination of more jobs than this dubious stimulus program can create."
Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby has a column about the Tenth Commandment and the #Occupy protests:
The violence is not tangential to the agenda. As the mounting hooliganism at Occupy encampments suggests, where class resentment takes root, predatory lawbreaking frequently follows. When politicians rail against "millionaires and billionaires," when social-activist campaigns scapegoat the "1 percent," it is only a matter of time before thugs feel emboldened to steal, rape, and worse. Class envy is not benign. At its most extreme -- the communist tyrannies of Lenin and Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot -- it unleashed the bloodiest genocides of the 20th century.
Three days after FutureOfCapitalism, LLC launchedNewsTransparency.com, Google says it's going to start integrating its Google+ profiles with bylines in Google News. A MediaBistro article says, "'Knowing who wrote an article can help readers understand the article's context and quality, see more articles by that person, and even interact directly with them,' wrote Software Engineer Eric Weigle in a Wednesday blog post announcing the new feature." Indeed. What Google's doing is somewhat different than what NewsTransparency is doing, but it's moving in a similar direction.
Democratic strategist Bob Beckel writes in his USA Today column about Herman Cain's speaking for some Koch-funded groups: "if you sleep with the dogs, you get fleas."
It's a sad day in this country when successful, job-creating businessmen like David and Charles Koch can be insulted in one of the largest newspapers as flea-ridden dogs, without even the courtesy of being asked for a response or being given a chance to defend themselves against the slur.
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