The quarterly drive for paying subscribers is winding down with this post. Thank you to all who have already renewed or joined up for the first time. We're approaching our goal but need a few more people to reach our internal quarterly target, so if you've been meaning to get around to it, please get that credit card out and sign up. The entry-level subscription is $49 a year, or less than $1 a week. Revenue from paying subscribers helps keep the site going and enables it to grow and expand the FutureOfCapitalism community. Only paying subscribers will receive the quarterly report to readers, which will go out soon. If you enjoy reading FutureOfCapitalism, if you learn from it, if you sometimes agree with it, the most helpful way to show that is by becoming a paying subscriber. The link to do that is here.

The Wall Street Journal has a news article about Ralph Nader's investment in Cisco, which it says at one point amounted to $1 million worth of his $3 million portfolio. I kind of like the idea that Mr. Nader, for all his criticism of corporate America, has chosen to invest at least this portion of his personal money not in Treasury bills or municipal bonds or in gold but in an American business.

For all Mr. Nader's advocacy of bigger government and more regulation, when it comes to his own money, or at least this chunk of it, he's chosen to park it with a corporation rather than with politicians. The article is about how he isn't particularly satisfied with how the investment has worked out, but even so, it's an interesting decision.

Note, too, that Mr. Nader isn't calling on Cisco's management to pay its workers more, or to hire more of them, or lay more of them off, but rather to return cash to shareholders. Of the range of options that shareholder activists might call for, this one isn't particularly radical.

RealClearPolitics has an interview with Senator Toomey of Pennsylvania, and asks him whether 5% growth is a reasonable goal:

If we had really dramatic tax reform, if we got our fiscal house in order, if we reform the big entitlement programs, if we rein in the regulators, and if we expand trade, I think it is entirely possible. You could average that. We could have a wave of innovation and investment that could very well produce something like that and it's a good goal to have.

Thanks to rent control, fugitive gangster Whitey Bulger was paying no more than $1,145 a month to live in a two-bedroom Santa Monica apartment three blocks from the Pacific Ocean, even as he kept hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash in the apartment, The Boston Globe reports.

Who is the bigger gangster, Bulger or the lawmakers who prevent property owners from charging a market-rate rent for such apartments? One of the perverse incentives of rent control is that the landlords stuck with rent-controlled apartments tend to find the richest possible tenants to lease to, in part because of the difficulty of evicting tenants for nonpayment of rent. So the rent-control laws wind up helping people, like Bulger, who could afford market-rate rents.

It's been a while since I've been in Santa Monica, but when I was working for the Los Angeles Times in Southern California in the mid-1990s, it was pretty nice there. A lot of homeless people, but good restaurants and nice weather.

From a Wall Street Journal editorial:

QE2 and near-zero interest rates have been a boon for bankers and hedge funds. They haven't been so great for suburban families who commute to work and haul their kids to football and music practice. The monetary policy so favored by liberal economists and the White House has actively favored the wealthy over the middle class.

With all respect due to the editorial writers at the Wall Street Journal, that is a strange set of sentences. Do the editorial writers think that no hedge fund managers or bankers live in the suburbs or haul their kids to sports or music practice? Or that no one in the "middle class" owns stocks?

"The Federal Trade Commission is poised to serve Google Inc. with civil subpoenas," the Wall Street Journal reports, attributing the news to anonymous "people familiar with the matter."

There are a number of remarkable things about this situation. From the Journal article: "Though the outcome is uncertain, the agency fought hard with the Justice Department to handle the case, said people familiar with the investigation, and so is thought to be unlikely to walk away without taking any action." There's an interesting dynamic: The FTC's action, by this account, will be governed not merely by the law but by internal government power politics.

There's some lively internecine warfare breaking out on the right side of the political spectrum over Governor Pawlenty's announcement of a 5% growth goal. Here's Kevin Williamson, a deputy managing editor of National Review, writing at National Review Online:

President Obama has a $1.5 trillion deficit on a $3.7 trillion federal budget and faces an August 2 deadline for Congress to raise the $14 trillion debt ceiling. Unemployment is around 9%, and U.S. GDP growth for the first quarter ran at an anemic annualized real rate of 1.8%.

All of these facts have been known for some time. So what has Mr. Obama been doing lately?

He got in a big fight with the prime minister of Israel.

He had dinner two nights in a row with Queen Elizabeth II.

He encouraged fathers to turn off their children's video games and make them read books instead.

He visited Puerto Rico.

He spoke at three Democratic National Committee fundraisers in Miami and two in Washington D.C.

Thank you to those who have already responded to our quarterly drive for paying subscribers. For those who weren't sold by yesterday's list of Ten Reasons To Become a Paying Subscriber, here are ten more reasons to click through and sign up:

1. The entry-level price has been reduced, at least as measured in gold. Back in September 2009, when subscription sales began on the site, the price of an ounce of gold was about $1000. Now it's about $1550. So a subscription that used to sell for five hundredths of an ounce of gold is now just about three hundredths of an ounce of gold. What a bargain!

2. The money from subscriptions helps make it possible for us to promote the site and help to grow its readership.

3. The entry-level subscription is about a quarter of the price of a subscription to the online New York Times, and FutureOfCapitalism will take and waste less of your time than the Times would.

The Cato Institute's Walter Olson, author of Schools for Misrule, has an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer about the Supreme Court's decision in Wal-Mart v. Dukes:

The misconceptions about this case begin with the identities of the real combatants. On NPR's Marketplace this week, Slate's Dahlia Lithwick described the plaintiffs as "1.5 million female employees of Wal-Mart who are trying to file a class-action suit." But, of course, most of those women are not "trying" to do anything of the sort.

Rather, a relative handful of them have hired lawyers, and those lawyers daringly sought to get themselves declared the legal representatives of the other 1.496 million (or however many), who have expressed no inclination whatsoever to sue.

Via Mike Allen's Politico Playbook comes news of the latest spin through the revolving door: Evan Liddiard, for 20 years a top tax aide to Senator Hatch of Utah, a Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, is leaving to become a partner at Urban Swirski & Associates, LLC, a tax and finance-oriented lobbying firm whose client list is here.

Which are the quotes from Democrats Richard Gephardt and John Kerry during the 2004 presidential campaign against George W. Bush, and which are the ones from Republicans Mitt Romney and Timothy Pawlenty during their current presidential campaigns against Barack Obama?

A. "With the recovery that we're supposed to be in, adding a thousand jobs is pathetic, nothing short of pitiful and pathetic…This president is presiding over an economy that is still not producing jobs."

B. "Today's jobs numbers show how far we are from any of the president's promises being kept."

C. "Today's unemployment numbers show that we are going backwards, and that is the wrong direction for America."

Philip Pan, an old Crimson friend of mine and the author of Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China, has a hunch about the reason behind Communist China's sudden ban on electric bikes: are the bike "makers still private firms battling state automakers?"

Ten reasons to become a paying subscriber or member of FutureOfCapitalism.com today:

1. You enjoy and learn from the content of FutureOfCapitalism.com and want to send an encouraging signal of support.

2. You're curious about what's going on behind the scenes and would like to get a copy of that quarterly report issued only to paying subscribers.

3. You don't want to be a free-rider on the other paying subscribers.

4. The more people who pay up, the sooner we can end this subscription drive and get back to providing original, interesting content.

5. At the entry level of just $49 a year, it's less than 14 cents a day, which is an unbelievable bargain for what is being provided.

6. Your money will be used to help improve FutureOfCapitalism.com and to expand its audience.

7. A FutureOfCapitalism.com bow tie?

8. If you do it right now, you won't have to remember to do it later.

9. If you do it right now, you won't have to worry about it again for another year.

10. You can figure out a way to expense it.

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida has an op-ed in the Daily Caller: "Every day that politicians delay action on these important issues, Americans feel the pain. And to be sure, growing the economy and cutting our debt won't be easy. It requires a sense of urgency that is in short supply in Washington."