Lewis Lehman has a piece in the Wall Street Journal saying that a key to federal deficit reduction is restoring the convertability of the dollar to gold at a fixed rate. The word "Nixon" doesn't appear in the piece, but it strikes me that that one word, along with inflation rapid and painful enough to make the issue a priority, is the key to the politics of the issue: framing it to the public as undoing Nixon's mistake of August 15, 1971.

A White House official in the George W. Bush administration, Noam Neusner, has a provocative piece in the Baltimore Jewish Times: "charities have done a very good job of turning themselves into a form of conspicuous consumption. Think about what charitable giving gives the donor: Higher social status, greater or redeemed reputation, a sense of well-being, attention and adoration from creative and interesting people, and a chance to support the work of people one likes."

He says these charities don't have the moral high ground when they call for higher taxes: "Such invocations would be taken more seriously if charities themselves paid taxes on their property and endowment gains, for example. They would be more believable if charities did not house themselves in fancy office buildings and pay their executives generous salaries. Their arguments would carry some credibility if charities accepted gifts without returning anything of value — such as named buildings — to the donor. None of this is the case, however."

The president of the American Enterprise Institute, Arthur Brooks, had an article in the Washington Post over the weekend countering President Obama's claim that it would be more "fair" to raise taxes on entrepreneurs:

In general, when resources are perceived as unearned, people think it fair that they be split up somewhat evenly. But when merit is involved, people believe it is fair to reward it with more money....

And so it is in our country. If opportunity in America is a sham--if the system is rigged and some people get the breaks only for reasons of luck, birth, or discrimination--then merit is fictitious and redistribution brings greater fairness. But if America is an opportunity society--if you have the chance to work harder, get more education and innovate--then rewarding merit is fair, and it is fair for some to make more money than others.

The spring issue of the Brandeis University alumni magazine has a piece headlined "Taking On Wall Street: The behind-the-scenes tale of 
how two Brandeis graduates challenged 
financial powerhouse Goldman Sachs 
in a historic legal showdown." It offers some background about two SEC officials, Lorin Reisner and Kenneth Lench, who, the article says, have had careers that were "deeply influenced by their time on the Brandeis campus in the early 1980s."

From the article:

Influenced by Brandeis' climate of activism, Reisner became involved in politics on campus, running for and winning a seat on the student senate. When a favorite Spanish professor who had opened Reisner's eyes to what he saw as faulty U.S. policy in Latin America was denied tenure, Reisner organized student opposition....

The Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman has a column in Monday's New York Times endorsing "The People's Budget" from the Congressional Progressive Caucus. This is the "People's" budget in the same nonsensical sense that North Korea is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea; Professor Krugman himself acknowledges that it "has no chance of becoming law anytime soon."

Nonetheless, I was curious to see what Professor Krugman was so effusive about, so I clicked through to the summary. Highlights: Dividends and capital gains would be taxed as ordinary income rather than at the current 15% rate. Ordinary income would be taxed according to the Schakowsky millionaire tax rates, which are also backed by Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York, quite a few of whose constituents would be affected. Those rates are:

In the Wall Street Journal, Gordon Crovitz tries to explain why Wikileaks is different from the New York Times:

The Espionage Act requires willfully endangering the U.S. It may seem unusual to consider intent in the context of how information flows, but without focusing on intent, the law would raise serious First Amendment issues. Many academics and media commentators—and perhaps overly cautious prosecutors—have missed the point that WikiLeaks is different from the New York Times. It's the political motivation of Mr. Assange that qualifies him to be prosecuted.

Right, it's not like the New York Times has any political motivation. Not like the paper, say, publishes editorials expressing strong opinions on political matters. Or like the reporters or editors there have any opinions.

Then there's this, from Mr. Crovitz:

The New York Post reports:

Taxpayers may pay $800,000 to give a life-saving heart transplant to an upstate rapist...

If doctors give the OK, Kenneth Pike, 55, would be the first New York prisoner to get a heart transplant. Pike was flown Monday from the state prison in Coxsackie to Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, where 49 patients are awaiting donor hearts.

Pike is serving an 18-to-40-year sentence for sexually assaulting a teenage relative.... He's eligible for parole in 2013....Lots of law-abiding Americans have no way to pay for a heart transplant, and rightly wonder why such care would be offered to prisoners, said Arthur Caplan, a medical ethics expert at the University of Pennsylvania.

Remember the Supreme Court's 2005 eminent domain ruling in Kelo v. New London that the constitution did not prevent the City of New London, Connecticut, from seizing private homes for a redevelopment project anchored by Pfizer? Newsbusters.org provides a useful update. Pfizer's pullout in 2009 attracted some press attention at the time. The latest news, reported Friday in a local newspaper, is that a new developer wants to build rental townhouses on the property — but only if it gets tax abatements from the city. As Newsbusters.org notes, "This outcome makes a complete mockery of the Supreme Court majority's belief that a 'carefully formulated ... economic development plan' was ever in place."

The death toll is rising in Syria as its dictatorship fires on protesters. The Daily Telegraph reports that 54 people were killed Friday, bringing the total to at least 220 since protests began last month. Cyberdissidents.org reproduces a report of 80 killed Friday, while the Washington Post quotes Razan Zaitouneh, a human rights lawyer in Damascus, who says 76 people were confirmed dead.

In the face of this, the most the Obama administration has so far offered up, so far as I can tell, is the following exchange between the press corps and a wan White House press secretary:

The chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, will on Wednesday at 2:15 p.m. hold what is being billed as his first-ever regular press briefing.

Here are some questions that might be worth asking.

1. When you took over as chairman of the Federal Reserve on February 1, 2006, a dollar was worth one five-hundred-sixty-seventh of an ounce of gold. This month, the dollar fell to one fifteen-hundredth of an ounce of gold. Why has the value of the dollar, as measured in gold, fallen by more than half since you have taken over as chairman? What information is being transmitted, in your understanding, by that change in the price of the dollar as measured in gold? Do you pay much attention that that price? Do you see the value of the dollar as primarily your responsibility or as primarily that of the Treasury Department?

"Can federal bureaucrats tell a private company where to build a factory?" is the question with which the Washington Examiner begins its editorial on the stunning attempt by the National Labor Relations Board to force Boeing to build an airplane with union workers in Washington state rather than in right-to-work South Carolina.

The NLRB has a press release, a "fact sheet", and a copy of the full NLRB complaint. The NLRB claims it isn't telling Boeing to fire the 1,000 workers it has already hired in South Carolina, just that Boeing must also maintain two unionized production lines in Washington State.

The advertising man and restaurateur Jerry Della Femina has a column in the Long Island Press explaining why he is selling his restaurant in East Hampton after 18 years:

In 2008 I watched Barack Obama run over Hillary Clinton to become our President.

From the very first "Yes We Can" and "Change You Can Believe In," I decided that this country was falling in love with an attractive, great-speechmaking hustler/socialist who, if he got into office, was going to pursue his agenda to destroy the best health care in the world and re-distribute wealth. Yours and mine.

I told my friends that from that moment on everything I owned—my houses, my advertising business, my newspaper and my restaurant—was for sale....

If you think that Obama's plan for over-taxing everyone but the 46 percent who don't pay any income tax (including his friend Jeffery Imholt and General Electric) will stop after he's re-elected in 2012, you are naïve.

Why does this so go against my grain?

Nearly three years on, the "failure" of AIG and its takeover by the government is both one of the most well known episodes of the financial crisis and one of the worse understood.

Into that paradox steps Roddy Boyd, a former colleague of mine at the New York Sun, with a new book: Fatal Risk: A Cautionary Tale of AIG's Corporate Suicide.

One of the strengths of the book is the background it provides about some of the personalities involved in AIG, an insurance company that branched out into other financial services. One central character is Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, AIG's longtime chief executive. Mr. Greenberg's father, a cab driver, was killed in an accident when Hank Greenberg was five. Hank went on to land with the Allied army in the invasion of Normandy, fighting his way though Europe and arriving at Dachau within a day of that concentration camp's liberation. Then, in the Korean War, he commanded an infantry platoon.

The AFL-CIO has unveiled a new "Executive Pay Watch" Web site. Yahoo! News reports on it without making any mention of the salaries of the labor union executives. Bloomberg News does slightly better, mentioning AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka's $283,340 annual compensation and Service Employees International Union President Mary Kay Henry's $253,660 annual compensation. But those are among the less well-paid union leaders. What about the president of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Gerald McEntee, who federal records show was paid $555,367 in total compensation in 2010, a fact that, outrageously, was omitted from a recent interview/profile of Mr. McEntee by the New York Times' longtime labor reporter, Steven Greenhouse? Or Mr. McEntee's secretary-treasurer at AFSCME, William Lucy, who made $847,810 from the union? What about Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, whose compensation for 2010 was more than $600,000?

"Google and Cisco to Join White House Effort to Promote Entrepreneurship" is the headline over a Bloomberg News article about Google's announcement that it is "committing up to $100 million to Startup America Partnership member companies to enable entrepreneurs to promote their companies with Google advertising over the next year."

The Google blog post says what the White House announcement doesn't: participants will "receive a $1,000 Google match for $1,000 spent between June 1, 2011 and June 1, 2012." So it's not really free advertising, it's 50% off advertising, on a product for which Google's marginal costs are low and its operating margins are high. I wouldn't be surprised, in fact, if Google actually on a net basis increased its profits on the basis of this "commitment."