The Browser has an interview with Yana van der Meulen Rodgers, director of the Rutgers University Project on Economics and Children, in which she recommends a bunch of picture books with economics lessons. None of them are exactly what you'd call Austrian, or even Milton Friedman-style, as far as I can tell, but maybe there's an opportunity there. One of the books is by, of all people, Sheila Bair. At least the list doesn't include The Rainbow Fish.

Rep. Ron Paul: "I don't think we need regulators. We need law and order. We need people to fulfill their contracts...The market is a great regulator, and we've lost understanding and confidence that the market is probably a much stricter regulator."

There's a lot of wisdom there, though he'll probably be mocked for the comment.

Eric Alterman, the $166,895 a year "distinguished professor of English and journalism at Brooklyn College" who when he is not busy being distinguished manages to hold down three other jobs — at the Daily Beast, the Nation, and the Center for American Progress — has a column up that tries somehow to drag September 11 workers into the tax debate:

The University of Tennessee law professor known as Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds, has an op-ed piece in the New York Post about Columbia's threat to use state power of eminent domain to seize land in Manhattan for a campus expansion:

Part of the American Dream was the expectation that if you started a business, you might go broke but you didn't have to worry about the government seizing your business on behalf of those with more political juice. That sort of thing was for Third World countries, corrupt kleptocracies where connections mattered more than capability.

Not anymore.

The Wall Street Journal has a pretty interesting article on how the Securities and Exchange Commission's Regulation Fair Disclosure — "Reg FD" — "inadvertently helped pave the way for a new era of insider trading." The article also notes that "Insider trading isn't defined by a legal statute."

The New York Times has a good story about the fact that Pimco is using the names of Alan Greenspan, Joshua Bolten (who was President George W. Bush's chief of staff) and former Treasury official Neel Kashkari to help raise money for a new fund to buy distressed mortgage debt from banks. It's been reported that Mr. Greenspan consults to Pimco and that Mr. Kashkari went to work there, but I hadn't seen the Bolten angle before.

One quibble with the Times story: It says, "While Pimco did not create shoddy mortgages or contribute to the crisis, its presentation to investors, which was prepared in October, suggests that former senior officials are now poised to help investors benefit from the disastrous financial developments that occurred while they held power in Washington."

Paul Krugman has a column in the New York Times faulting the Republicans on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission for objecting to the use of the term "Wall Street":

Last week, reports Shahien Nasiripour of The Huffington Post, all four Republicans on the commission voted to exclude the following terms from the report: "deregulation," "shadow banking," "interconnection," and, yes, "Wall Street."

When Democratic members refused to go along with this insistence that the story of Hamlet be told without the prince, the Republicans went ahead and issued their own report, which did, indeed, avoid using any of the banned terms.

Columnist Charles Krauthammer, writing about the tax cut bill that passed the House at midnight, 277-148:

Obama pulled this off at his lowest political ebb. After the shambles of the election and with no bargaining power - the Republicans could have gotten everything they wanted on the Bush tax cuts retroactively in January without fear of an Obama veto - he walks away with what even Paul Ryan admits was $313 billion in superfluous spending.

Add a category to the list in the earlier post on "Who Are the Unemployed," according to former Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas president Bob McTeer, now writing for the National Center for Policy Analysis:

I recently talked to executives in the construction business who gave me a perspective that shouldn't have been new to me, but was. They said that, in practice, many lower-level, lower-wage workers collect unemployment benefits and also work a day or two a week "off the books," and that this combined income compared favorably with wages-only income. Consequently, many workers—not just a few, but many—are content with their unemployed status.

One of the complaints that Monet Parham and the Center for Science in the Public Interest make in their Happy Meal lawsuit against McDonald's is that the meals have too many calories. From the suit:

McDonald's Web site lists 24 Happy Meal combinations. Considering that a reasonable lunch for a young child would contain no more than 430 calories (one third of the 1,300 calories that is the recommended daily intake for children 4 to 8 years old), not a single Happy Meal meets that target. The average of all 24 meals is 26 percent higher in calories than a reasonable lunch. In fact, one meal (cheeseburger, French fries, and chocolate milk) hits 700 calories — a whopping 63 percent higher (and more than half the calories for the entire day).

The source for these numbers was McDonald's own published Happy Meals nutrition information available on its website, and dated June 2, 2010.

Three days after it received the pre-suit notice, McDonald's altered this data, reducing the amount of calories and sugar. After McDonald's altered its own data, three of the 24 meals suddenly met the calorie target described in the pre-suit notice.

In response, a FutureOfCapitalism.com reader-participant-content co-creator-community member-watchdog has helpfully provided the San Francisco public schools elementary school lunch menu for November. Weekly average per-meal calories for the government school meals, not including drinks, are, according to the menu, 708, 662, 666, 730, and 650.

The president of the Club for Growth, Chris Chocola, has an op-ed in USA Today about the death tax: "Does the money you earn over the course of your life belong to you, or does it really belong to the government, which generously allows you to keep some of it for a while?"

Life insurers are pushing for the estate tax on Capitol Hill so that they can then make money by selling people life insurance policies as a way of getting around the estate tax, Timothy Carney reports at the Washington Examiner:

It's stunning, even by K Street standards: The life insurance lobby spends millions to create the conditions (a high inheritance tax) from which it then promises to protect customers with its tax-free insurance products. Life insurance companies are lobbying against the interests of their own customers.

The industry hopes its 45 percent proposal (with a $3.5 million exemption), drafted by outgoing Rep. Earl Pomeroy, D-N.D., can make it into the House bill after the Senate bill set a 35 percent rate and $5 million exemption. Pomeroy said he will vote against the tax bill without his estate tax provision.

The four Republican-appointed members of the ten-member Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission — Bill Thomas, Peter Wallison, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, and Keith Hennessey — have posted a 13-page summary of their findings: "While we believe that the government deserves quite a lot of the blame for getting our financial system and our nation into trouble in the first place, we applaud the quick and decisive actions taken by our nation's leaders during the panic."

They conclude by warning of a sovereign debt crisis unless policymakers act to tackle the deficit.

The comment of the day, from our earlier post on the anti-Happy Meal lawsuit against McDonald's:

Ms. Parham is the same person as "Monet Parham-Lee". Monet Parham-Lee is an employee of the California Department of Public Health. Interestingly, her name has been scrubbed from the website of Champions for Change, the Network for a Healthy California. She has given numerous presentations and attended conferences on the importance of eating vegetables and whatnot.

She presents herself as an ordinary mother. She is not. She is an advocate, and an employee of a California agency tasked with advocating the eating of vegetables. To the extent that Monet Parham-Lee has EVER taken her daughter to a McDonald's, she should have known better.

Personally, I've always taken the position that french fries are vegetables, especially if there's ketchup involved.

Here's a bio:

A California mother and an advocacy group have filed a lawsuit against McDonald's in California trying to force the company to stop advertising Happy Meal toys, National Public Radio reports:

The group filed the class action suit on behalf of parents, including plaintiff Monet Parham, a 41-year-old mother of two from Sacramento who says she's fed up with the pestering.

"Happy meals are among the those things frequently requested, and the first thing they ask me to do is open the toy," Parham said in a press conference today. "I'm really concerned about the health of my children, and I don't think its OK to entice children to get Happy Meals with a toy," she added.

If she's really concerned about the health of her children, no one is forcing her to go to McDonald's in the first place. And if she can't figure out how to say no to her children, it's a problem that's about more than just McDonald's.