The head of the public housing authority in Chelsea, Mass., was being paid "$334,642 a year, plus an additional amount equal to four weeks of unused vacation, $25,741 for this year," the Boston Globe reports. Philadelphia Housing Authority executive Carl Green's base salary was $306,376, the Globe article says.

Even Boston's Democratic governor, Deval Patrick, said the salary of the Chelsea guy was outrageous.

Tom Easton of the Economist and Virginia Postrel of Bloomberg split the $50,000 award for the Bastiat Prize for Journalism, which was awarded Wednesday night at a dinner in New York.

Mr. Easton won in part for an Economist piece headlined Bamboo Capitalism. It concluded, "Too many people—not just third-world dictators but Western business tycoons—have fallen for the Beijing consensus, the idea that state-directed capitalism and tight political control are the elixir of growth. In fact China has surged forward mainly where the state has stood back. 'Capitalism with Chinese characteristics' works because of the capitalism, not the characteristics."

Ad Age reports:

The Federal Communications Commission has proposed requiring television stations to post online information about their political advertisers.

That information, currently kept in paper files at the stations, includes the names of candidates or groups requesting to run an ad, the reason for broadcasting the ad, the time and placement of the ad and its cost.

Moving that information online to a website that would be run by the FCC has provoked concern from the National Association of Broadcasters.

In addition to the previously reported (by Politico's Maggie Haberman) $999-a-head Herman Cain fundraiser in New York City on November 11, 2011 (11/11/11!), the Republican presidential candidate is having a higher-dollar event that evening, according to an invitation to the event obtained by FutureOfCapitalism.com. Minimum contribution is $1000, with a $2,500 contribution getting donors "Cain Club" status and $5,000 ($2,500 for the primary, $2,500 for the general) making a donor a "sustaining member." The event is at Club 101 on Park Avenue.

An editorial in this morning's Wall Street Journal about Jon Corzine and the bankruptcy of MF Global asserts: "To prevent future bailouts on this side of the Atlantic, the key is to understand that big-bank CEOs can also be tempted to pull a Corzine. To protect taxpayers from the consequences, the solution is very high capital standards for the biggest firms."

It would be nice to know how high the Journal thinks these "very high" capital standards should be, how it thinks such capital should be measured, who should set the standards, and what qualifies as a "biggest" firm. It's all easier said than done, in my view. In the worst case scenario, you end up with bureaucrats in Basel setting standards that make the American economy worse instead of better. Maybe a better way of preventing future bailouts is to just not have bailouts, rather than to try to construct some sort of regulatory scheme to prevent them that inevitably isn't going to succeed and that will have all kinds of unintended consequences.

The possibility that newscaster Tom Brokaw would run for president in 2012 is the subject of my latest weekly column, which is up at Reason.com. The column is prompted by Mr. Brokaw's new book, The Time of Our Lives: A Conversation About America. You can read the column here: "Neither of his parents attended college. His mother grew up in a house without indoor plumbing, and she worked nights as a waitress. His wife made her entire college wardrobe at her Singer sewing machine. Yet eventually he made millions of dollars a year. The candidate's issues-based campaign platform includes getting tough on public employee unions, expanding charter schools, privatizing public toll roads, and means-testing Medicare."

Don Surber writes on the latest government-backed energy company to seek protection from creditors: "I suppose if you mean by green energy jobs bankruptcy lawyers, Professor Chu seems to be creating a lot of jobs."

Today is the launch of NewsTransparency.com, a new site that helps you find out more about the people who produce the news and allows you to hold them accountable, the same way that journalists hold other powerful institutions accountable, by posting reviews and sharing information. There is press coverage of NewsTransparency at Forbes, at the Poynter Institute's site (in not just one but two pieces), at the Future Journalism Project, and at Mike Allen's Politico Playbook.

The Wall Street Journal has an interview with Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida. He says:

The Republican Party needs to be the pro-legal immigration party. We need to say, 'We believe in immigration and we think it's good for America.' But it has to be orderly, a system based on law, a system that works.

We can't be seen as party of status quo. Everyone agrees that with 11 million people here illegally, a broken enforcement process, lack of respect for the law, is not sustainable. We're not an enforcement-only party, we're a reform party, and we believe in reform. We have to do a better job of advocating that, and we have to do a better job of promoting policies that honor us as nation of immigrants but also a nation of laws. And people feel laws have been taken advantage of.

A package of reforms that doesn't encourage illegal immigration but strengthens our legal immigration system is something I want the party to take a lead on, and hopefully I can be a part of that.

USA Today has an editorial that comes out in favor of American government approval for the Keystone oil pipeline, which would stretch from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico:

Critics further charge that companies plan to use the pipeline to export petroleum through the Gulf of Mexico, not distribute it within the USA. That would be a powerful criticism if it were true, because it would undercut the argument that the pipeline will help meet U.S. oil needs. TransCanada, which is building the line, says the charge is false, and Valero Energy, which would be a user of the line, says it has no intention of using the Canadian oil for export. Those assurances are welcome; even so, it would be wise for the State Department to make them a condition for approval.

It's not just solar energy under the Obama administration where government money has been poured into alternative energy projects that don't work out. From a Bloomberg News profile of Nicolas Berggruen, who Bloomberg says "parlayed a trust fund worth about $250,000 into a fortune of at least $2.5 billion":

In 2006, a subsidiary of Berggruen Holdings invested $85 million and helped secure a $100 million line of credit, as well as a $20 million loan from the state of Oregon, to build the largest ethanol plant on the West Coast. He believed, erroneously he now says, that ethanol would be a growing source of clean energy despite the chemicals and dirty fuels used to transform corn into fuel.

The ethanol company filed for bankruptcy in 2009. Construction delays, plant outages, a sulfate-contaminated ethanol shipment and the narrowing spread between corn and ethanol prices doomed the project.

"It was a disaster," Berggruen says.

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein was on the PBS NewsHour last night for a segment titled "Does U.S. Economic Inequality Have a Good Side?" Highlights:

You can tell the difference between a liberal and conservative by the following test. A liberal believes that changes in taxes have very little effect on production, but huge effects favorable on distribution.

Folks like myself believe it's exactly the opposite. Very high tax rates or even small changes in taxes have very adverse effects on production, and they do very little to produce redistribution, because the money gets dissipated and taken away through the political process in the ways that even the most ardent supporters of redistribution will not like.

More:

PAUL SOLMAN: Aren't many of the top 1 percent or 0.1 percent in this country rich because they're in finance?

RICHARD EPSTEIN: Yes. Many of the very richest people in the United States are rich because they are in finance.

Here are the remarks of Congressman Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, as prepared for delivery today at the Heritage Foundation:

We're here today to explore the American Idea, and I can't think of a better venue for this topic. The mission of the Heritage Foundation is to promote the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense.

These are the principles that define the American Idea. And this mission has never been timelier, because these principles are very much under threat from policies here in Washington.

Noam Neusner, a former aide to President George W. Bush, has a piece in the nonprofit Jewish newspaper the Forward on taxing charities:

the charities themselves are where the real money is. ... Consider New York City. Its two biggest landowners are the Catholic Church and Columbia University. Neither pays property taxes. They use the roads. They use the police. Why should they get a break on paying their fair share?

And then we can talk about those charitable endowments. Endowments never pay a dime in capital gains taxes. It's as if nonprofits operate in the financial marketplace with a 20% head start over every other investor when it comes to returns. And for what benefit? Most endowments disgorge a puny share of their total assets each year to support actual charitable work. The rest is hoarded.

The use of terms like "parasitical" and "bloodsucker" to describe the financial industry is rooted in Marxist-Leninism, Nazism, and anti-Semitism, and has been the subject of earlier coverage on this site here and here. The latest offender in this regard is James Williams, a former aide to Senator Durbin, the Senate majority whip. Mr. Durbin is a Democrat from Illinois. Here is the relevant passage, from an article in today's Roll Call:

"At this point, it's safe to say many in the Democratic caucus see Sen. Lieberman as a mosquito," said Jimmy Williams, a former aide to Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.). "The bad news is he has sucked enough blood from both sides of the aisle. The good news is winter is coming, meaning his time in the Senate will thankfully come to an end."