Mike Allen's Politico Playbook has a quote from a speech to be delivered today by the governor of Mississippi, Haley Barbour, a likely Republican presidential candidate:

People see clearly that a bigger government means a smaller economy. So, it's time we made economic growth, not government growth our top domestic priority. Let me say it again: Bigger government equals a smaller private economy. The private sector can't grow and create jobs if government sucks up all the money.

More on the same speech, from the Associated Press:

He says economic growth would not be achieved through "government boondoggles like taxpayer-subsidized high-speed rail or other pet projects" or by "having government take control of our automakers, financial sector, health care system and energy industry."

"Fiddling While Libya Burns" is the headline over an op-ed piece in today's New York Times by Anne-Marie Slaughter. The Times identifies her as "a professor of politics and international affairs" at Princeton but doesn't mention to readers that she and her husband accepted an expense-paid trip to Libya in 2007 from a consulting firm that was paid by the Libyan government.

Reason Magazine has a piece on the regulatory barriers facing would-be food vendors. Link via The Browser.

From a New York Times news article about a horrible bus accident on I-95:

The wife of a Jacobi Medical Center surgeon said her husband called her from work and described a passenger with a crushed skull and others with hand and arm amputations. She showed an iPhone photo, texted from Jacobi, of a hand and forearm, severed just below the elbow, lying on an operating table.

The Times article doesn't say to whom this iPhone photo was shown or who texted it, but if it was to a reporter, how inappropriate was that, and how weird is it for the surgeon, or anyone else in the operating room, to be texting operating-room photos home to his wife, and for the wife to be then showing the photos to a reporter, and for the reporter to be then shielding the behavior of both the surgeon and the wife with the newspaper-bestowed protection of anonymity?

From Bob Herbert's column in the New York Times:

Senator Kerry will introduce legislation next week to create a federal infrastructure bank — officially, the American Infrastructure Financing Authority — to provide loans and loan guarantees to large, essential infrastructure projects. The loans will be seed money used to leverage other sources of funding.

"These are strictly loans — not grants — for commercially viable projects," the senator said. "The federal government does no more than 50 percent of the loan. We expect that to leverage $600 billion or so in infrastructure investments over time."

Mr. Kerry said the initial cost to the government would be $10 billion.

Yesterday's item on Grover Norquist's interview with the Washington Post quoted Mr. Norquist, "You know, there's an investment fund that goes into the S&P 500 when Congress is in session and into cash when Congress is out of session. They've got a study showing the market rises more rapidly when Congress is out of session." In fact, a reader-watchdog-participant-community member points out that either Mr. Norquist or the Washington Post has it backward, and so did we in repeating it — the Congressional Effect Fund goes into cash when Congress is in session and into the S&P 500 when Congress is on recess.

The NAACP, of all places, is standing up for banks and credit card companies against the federal government's effort to impose a cap on debit card interchange fees. The Wall Street Journal reports:

In a letter to House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) NAACP Washington bureau director Hilary Shelton said the civil-rights group believes the proposed rule "should be further examined fully to ensure that it does not have a negative impact on the communities it was meant to help." Specifically, Mr. Shelton raised concerns that the rule could unintentionally make it harder for poor and minority consumers to afford checking accounts and other basic financial services.

The Journal doesn't mention it, nor does a Bloomberg dispatch about the same topic, but NAACP's 2008 annual report, the most recent available on the group's Web site, lists six corporations as donors at the top level, $500,000 and above. Two of the six are Bank of America Corporation and Wachovia Corporation.

Filmmaker Michael Moore, who has embraced the public employee union cause in Wisconsin as his own, reportedly used some non-union crew members without health benefits to make his movie Capitalism A Love Story. Big Hollywood's John Nolte has details, based on an original report by ABC News.

As far as federal complaints go, the one filed yesterday against lobbyist Richard Lipsky (my Facebook friend!) and New York State Senator Carl Kruger may be less than meets the eye, relying as it does on "conspiracy" and "honest services" statutes that are notoriously elastic for prosecutors looking for something upon which to pin a crime on a target. Mr. Kruger seems to have an unusual lifestyle: The New York Times news article reports, "Activists traveled last year to the Turano residence and the Brooklyn home of Mr. Kruger's sister, protesting loudly and saying Mr. Kruger himself was gay. Mr. Kruger has said he is not gay." But that hardly amounts to a federal crime.

That will all be for the courts to figure out. In the meantime, what concerns us here is the complaint's handling of the anti-Walmart lobbying campaign in New York City.

Bloomberg News's Caroline Baum has a contrarian column about the effect of rising oil prices on the American economy:

Higher oil prices are always viewed as a negative because they crimp consumer purchasing power.

It's not a one way street. Wealth is transferred from consumers to producers and recycled.

Higher prices act as an incentive for oil exploration. Exxon Mobil Corp. buys new drilling equipment and hires more workers. Those dollars go back into the economy, they don't suck life out of it.

Because the U.S. imports about half of its crude oil, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, some of those profits end up in the pockets of the Saudi royal family and other Middle East potentates.

What do they do with them? They spend them on U.S. goods and services. They buy U.S. stocks, bonds, trophy real estate and F-16 fighter jets.

This doesn't happen simultaneously, of course. But to portray every dollar of oil profit as a net drain on the economy is inaccurate.

Thanks again to all of those who responded to the quarterly drive and became paying subscribers to FutureOfCapitalism.com. I'm hoping to get the quarterly report to paying customers out by the end of the week. Just as a reminder, there are non-monetary ways to help, too, and they are appreciated, too. You can help spread the word by posting items on Facebook or Twitter, by telling friends who might like the site to check it out, and by becoming a fan of FutureOfCapitalism on Facebook and following it on Twitter. And you can participate by joining the discussion in the comments section — good examples of civilized back and forth are the comments on the item last month, Krugman and Obama on Infant Nutrition — or by emailing ideas for items to [email protected].

The Economist has a guide: "try funding a prize at UNESCO or some other international do-gooding outfit....Armed with social and cultural clout, you can approach money-hungry academia and think-tanks. A good combination is a Washington, DC, think-tank and a London-based university (Oxford and Cambridge, being richer, are also choosier about whom they take money from). The package deal should involve a centre (perhaps with a professorial chair) and a suitable title: it should include words like global, sustainable, strategic and ethical....Invite retired politicians and officials for lucrative speaking engagements and consultancy work: word will soon get around and the soon-to-retire will bear your interests in mind."

The Republican Party's 2008 presidential candidate, Senator McCain, is joining with Senator Kerry, the Democratic Party's 2004 presidential candidate, to impose onerous rules that could strangle, or at least slow, one of the few fast-growing sectors of the American economy, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Well, actually, the way the Journal phrases it is that the two senators "are circulating proposed legislation to create an 'online privacy bill of rights,' according to people familiar with the situation, a sign of bipartisan support for efforts to curb the Internet-tracking industry."

Bjorn Lomborg has a new column up about ethanol and food prices:

Spectators at February's Daytona 500 in Florida were handed green flags to wave in celebration of the news that the race's stock cars now use gasoline with 15% corn-based ethanol....

The United States spends about $6 billion a year on federal support for ethanol production through tax credits, tariffs, and other programs. Thanks to this financial assistance, one-sixth of the world's corn supply is burned in American cars. That is enough corn to feed 350 million people for an entire year...

This year, after a particularly bad growing season, we see the results. Global food prices are the highest they have been since the United Nations started tracking them in 1990, pushed up largely by increases in the cost of corn. Despite the strides made recently against malnutrition, millions more people will be undernourished than would have been the case in the absence of official support for biofuels.

The president of Americans for Tax Reform, Grover Norquist, gave an interview to Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, and gave a nice mention to the Congressional Effect Fund:

EK: Just so I have this right: You're arguing that the boom in the mid-1990s wasn't because of the Internet or because we were snapping back from a recession, but because the election of a Republican Congress had a major confidence effect.

GN: Yes. You knew Republicans would cut the capital gains tax and wouldn't do the list of things Clinton had planned. Similarly, the economy is strengthening now because all the things Obama was going to do aren't going to happen. You know, there's an investment fund that goes into the S&P 500 when Congress is in session and into cash when Congress is out of session. They've got a study showing the market rises more rapidly when Congress is out of session. It's 17 times more rapid.