An adjunct faculty member, economist, and fellow for economic and social policy with The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College, Mark Hendrickson, has an op-ed piece in the Christian Science Monitor picked up in Yahoo! News:

Our problem, and therefore our solution, is not primarily political, but ethical. We have lost our respect for the principle of private property. Through intellectual sophistries, we have convinced ourselves that we are entitled to some of what our neighbors have. We believe that the source of our supply is government (i.e., our fellow citizens) rather than our own contributions in the economic marketplace.

Instead of wanting a government that is limited to protecting our God-given rights, we seem to want a government that gives us things that it has, in effect, taken from others. Unless and until we divest ourselves of the notion that A has a "right" to B's property, we will continue to lurch toward bankruptcy....unless we make a fundamental change in what we expect from government, we are likely to stay on the road to bankruptcy

"Global Investors Rebuff Republicans in Poll Showing 2-to-1 Say Raise Taxes" is the headline over a Bloomberg News article about a Bloomberg poll of a sample of its own worldwide customers.

Here's what the poll actually asked: "Do you think it is or is not possible to bring down the U.S. deficit substantially without raising taxes?" Thirty-three percent answered "is possible," and 64% answered "is not possible."

But it should be obvious to anyone other than a Bloomberg News editor that asking whether something is "possible" is different than asking asking whether something "should" happen. I think the government should bring down the deficit substantially without raising taxes, but I don't think it's going to be possible so long as President Obama is in the White House and the Democrats have a majority in the Senate. My opinion isn't a rebuff of Republicans, it's a rebuff of the Democrats.

A professor of law at the University of San Diego, Frank Partnoy, has a piece in the Financial Times about the guilty verdict against Raj Rajaratnam:

it isn't clear from this case what insider trading even is. Many business people do not understand why Mr Rajaratnam committed crimes related to Intel's acquisition, yet it was apparently legal for David Sokol to buy Lubrizol shares just before it was acquired by his company, Berkshire Hathaway. There is no clear dividing line.

There are muddy questions of "materiality". And insider-trading law strangely requires someone (not necessarily the person who bought shares) to have breached a fiduciary duty to the source of the information. The US Supreme Court has called this convoluted requirement a judicial oak that grew from a legislative acorn. The focus on breach of duty makes the law maddeningly vague, and the links between trader and breacher can be attenuated. It is no surprise that Mr Rajaratnam's jury took 12 days.

A NY1-Marist College poll of 941 adult New Yorkers asked, "Thinking about five years from now, do you plan to stay in New York State or do you plan to move someplace else?" and got 26% to say they plan to move out of the state. Asked the main reason they planned to leave, 30% answered the cost of living, and 19% said taxes.

How's this for a loaded lead paragraph in a St. Petersburg Times "news" story? "A conservative billionaire who opposes government meddling in business has bought a rare commodity: the right to interfere in faculty hiring at a publicly funded university."

The headline, "Billionaire's role in hiring decisions at Florida State University raises questions," is also a classic, since it's the newspaper that's raising the questions.

The Weekly Standard's Daniel Halper has a response: "The real problem, then, is simply that the Kochs are conservative. Liberal interests can partner with and donate money to universities all they want and know that their interests will be furthered – most universities, of course, are predominantly made up of liberals." As others have pointed out, the Kochs are more libertarian than conservative, but the point stands.

"The Real Bipartisan Compromise: Cut Spending on the Rich," is the headline over a piece by Charles Blahous at Economic Policies for the 21st Century. He writes that by slowing the growth of Medicare and Social Security benefits for higher earners and by cutting or reducing farm subsidies to higher earners, "they can simultaneously advance Republican objectives of containing the growth of government, while also advancing the Democratic message of targeting federal resources on those of greatest need – and all while reducing federal deficits....Each party would also acquire a new defense against one of the other side's primary political attacks: Democrats would have shown a willingness to address runaway spending growth, while Republicans would have demonstrated their willingness to go after 'the rich.'"

"Is Your Religion Your Financial Destiny?" is the headline of an article in Sunday's New York Times magazine that has already been published on the Times Web site. The article reports, "The most affluent of the major religions — including secularism — is Reform Judaism. Sixty-seven percent of Reform Jewish households made more than $75,000 a year at the time the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life collected the data, compared with only 31 percent of the population as a whole. Hindus were second, at 65 percent, and Conservative Jews were third, at 57 percent."

It concludes: "Some of the income differences probably stem from culture. Some faiths place great importance on formal education. But the differences are also self-reinforcing. People who make more money can send their children to better schools, exacerbating the many advantages they have over poorer children. Round and round, the cycle goes. It won't solve itself."

The Associated Press reports: "A top telecommunications regulator who voted to approve Comcast Corp.'s takeover of NBCUniversal in January is leaving to join the company as a lobbyist. Meredith Attwell Baker, one of two Republicans on the five-member Federal Communications Commission, will become senior vice president of government affairs for NBCUniversal."

More private-sector job-creation, Washington-style. As I've said before, I don't think people in government should be prevented from leaving for work in the private sector. But at a certain point this happens often enough and the public begins to have reasonable doubts that what all the regulatory activity is actually about is much more than creating private-sector jobs for former regulators.

It turns out that Senator Schumer has voted four times against raising the federal debt ceiling, the Washington Examiner's Mark Tapscott reports, also passing along a quote from Michael Steel, an aide to Speaker Boehner. Mr. Steel says, "Sen. Schumer's voting record is like a dagger aimed at the heart of his own credibility. It is clear that the American people will not tolerate a 'blank check' hike in the debt limit unless we deal with the real issue: out-of-control Washington spending. We're listening to the American people, but the Democrats who run Washington, led by Sen. Schumer, are not."

Mr. Tapscott doesn't mention it, but the "dagger..heart" metaphor is a favorite of Mr. Schumer's, as the New York Sun noted in a pair of 2005 editorials (here and here) that may have inspired Mr. Steel.

Sometimes the New York Times isn't biased against Republicans, but just against the whole military. Or sometimes they just emphasize the bad news. How else to account for the headline over this item: "General in Abu Ghraib Scandal Files to Run for Senate in Texas"? It's about a retired general, Ricardo Sanchez, who is running as a Democrat. While he was the American commander in Iraq during the Abu Ghraib abuse, there's no evidence he was directly involved. I'm tempted to start making all my references to Arthur Sulzberger Jr. "Publisher in Jayson Blair Scandal."

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has unveiled "phase two" of his "YouCut" program that allows people to vote online on programs they think should be cut from the federal budget. I'm all for crowdsourcing and for using technology in innovative ways to make government more responsive, but the three programs that the phase two "YouCut" program allows visitors to vote on cutting — the "ambassador's fund for cultural preservation," the Asian Development Fund, and the U.N. Population Fund — strike me as disappointing choices, because they all involve overseas spending, and relatively small amounts of it (at least compared to the overall budget or even the deficit) at that — "$60 million over the next ten years," "$356 million over 10 years," and $47 million in 2012, respectively.

The Orange County Register has a blog post and Americans for Prosperity has a video on the compensation of government beach lifeguards in Newport Beach, California.

The Walter B. Wriston Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Josh Barro, has an op-ed piece arguing against Republican efforts to link a debt limit increase to spending cuts. He writes: "The best course would be for Congress to avoid a cash shortfall by passing a clean debt limit increase — or simply abolishing the debt limit altogether."

The limit certainly hasn't done much to restrain government spending. On the other hand, without it, it's possible things could be even worse. The real limit on government debt relates to how much of it the bond market is willing to absorb, and at what interest rate. But the Federal Reserve's willingness to buy government bonds makes even that limit flexible, up to a point.

This is the same Mr. Barro who earlier called for "a significant tax increase."

Harold Ford Jr. makes some fine points in this Wall Street Journal op-ed about the merits of more domestic drilling for oil and gas and about what a bad idea it is to either raise taxes on or demonize oil and gas producers, but what's not so sharp is the Journal's identification of him: "Mr. Ford, a former Democratic congressman from Tennessee, is a professor at New York University's Wagner School of Public Service."

P.J. O'Rourke, writing in the Weekly Standard: "Like everything, power has a price. And the price is right there in the federal budget—$3.8 trillion in government spending for 2011. Tax it. The old 'Bush tax cut' rate will suffice, 35 percent on high earners, or, in this case, 35 percent on high powers...Thirty-five percent of $3.8 trillion is $1.3 trillion. That's most of the deficit eliminated through one small alteration in the tax code. And there's a further benefit to our nation. Now that all three branches of government and every federal agency, department, and bureau owe back taxes, the IRS can go audit itself."