John Stossel has a new column wondering what has come over Alan Greenspan, who has been campaigning for repeal of the Bush tax cuts: "We libertarians were distressed by Greenspan's apparent abandonment of his free-market philosophy."

The Wall Street Journal has a full-page print ad, and the Amazon.com Web site is touting, the new generation of Kindle electronic readers. The pricing proposition in both the ad and the Web site goes something like this"kindle free 3G + wi-fi $189" and "kindle wi-fi only $139." In other words, the device is $139, but if you want the "free 3G," you've got to pay $189, or an additional $50. Call me old fashioned, but by my calculation, that isn't "free" 3G, it's 3G at a cost of $50.

Thanks to FutureOfCapitalism reader-participant-community member-watchdog-content co-creator S. for the tip.

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein has a new Forbes column up about New York City's desire to let private operators take over service on routes where the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and its unionized drivers have suspended service: "It is unconscionable for the City to create public service monopolies that allow the TWU to capture its lucrative contracts in the first place. As a matter of principle, let in the private vans all the time, regardless of whether budget cuts are needed. All union-run bus lines should always be subject to private competition, after which most will fail because of their inefficient work rules, bloated payrolls and overly expensive fleet."

The issue was mentioned earlier here in a post on July 6.

Thomas Sowell has a new column about the debate over admissions to Hunter College High School in New York:

actual performance-- whether in schools, on the job or elsewhere-- involves far more than native intelligence. Wasted intelligence does nothing for an individual or society.

The reason a surgeon can operate on your heart, while someone of equal intelligence who is not a surgeon cannot, is because of what different people actually did with their intelligence. That has always varied, not only from individual to individual but from group to group-- and not only in this country, but in countries around the world and across the centuries of human history.

One of the biggest fallacies of our time is the notion that, if all groups are not proportionally represented in institutions, professions or income levels, that shows something wrong with society. The very possibility that people make their own choices, and that those choices have consequences-- for themselves and for others-- is ignored. Society is the universal scapegoat.

"Inexperienced Companies Chase School Reform Funds," is the headline over a New York Times article that begins, disapprovingly, "With the Obama administration pouring billions into its nationwide campaign to overhaul failing schools, dozens of companies with little or no experience are portraying themselves as school-turnaround experts as they compete for the money....A husband-and-wife team that has specialized in teaching communication skills but never led a single school overhaul is seeking contracts in Ohio and Virginia. ...Many of the new companies seem unprepared for the challenge of making over a public school, yet neither the federal government nor many state governments are organized to offer effective oversight, said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, a nonprofit group in Washington."

Back on December 4, 2009, in a post headlined The Welfare State and Military Spending, I commented on a Wall Street Journal editorial warning that "Over time, the welfare state will defeat the Pentagon here, as it has in Europe." I wrote then, "It's interesting to think about, if you agree with that conclusion, how to invest in it. Short defense contractors? The problem is that all it takes is one big 9/11-style terrorist attack on American soil to send defense spending headed in the other direction. Or a transformative politician like Ronald Reagan."

The New York Times has a front-page article focusing on three New York museums who provide their directors with housing whose value is not taxable as income under the theory that the apartments are the site of business-related entertaining.

In addition to her $877,000 compensation package, Ellen V. Futter, president of the American Museum of Natural History, lives rent free in a $5 million East Side apartment that the museum bought when she came aboard.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art houses its director, Thomas P. Campbell, in a $4 million co-op that it owns across Fifth Avenue from the museum.

The director of the Museum of Modern Art, Glenn D. Lowry, may have the best deal of all. In addition to the $2 million in salary and benefits he earned last year, he lives in a $6 million condo in the tower atop the museum.

The Cato Institute has the details on how visitors to Shenandoah National Park are being "subjected to pure propaganda" that is "clearly designed to glorify the highly debatable policies of a sitting — and likely to run for reelection — president."

William McGurn has a Wall Street Journal column tying together the California gay marriage ruling, the Ground Zero mosque, the Arizona immigration law, and ObamaCare all as examples of elite "moralizing about the ugly motives of the American people," the belief, shared by much of the press, that "You can't trust ordinary Americans."

His point is less to attack gay marriage, ObamaCare, and the Ground Zero mosque or to defend the Arizona immigration law than to argue against the assumption that opponents of gay marriage, ObamaCare, and the Ground Zero mosque or defenders of the Arizona immigration law are all a bunch of bigots.

Thanks to reader-participant-watchdog-community member-content co-creator E. for sending the link.

Further to the review of Confidence Game posted below, a FutureOfCapitalism reader-participant-community member-content co-creator watchdog emails to make the point that short sellers do not have to be right about their investment thesis. If they only succeed in destroying confidence in a company or creating uncertainty and doubt, they will likely succeed in making money on their investment.

In almost every case where a company failed to reverse the tide of skepticism and criticism advanced by the press, regulators, politicians, rating agencies, Wall Street analysts and others who were the front men and women for the arguments put forward by the short sellers, the targets required the ability to refinance short-term debt and to maintain short-term business relationships. For a retailer, it might be vendors who don't ship because they are convinced that the retailer may not pay for the inventory they ship. For financial companies, it could be depositors or buyers of short-term paper who balk at rolling over obligations or withdraw their funds from the institution.

Confidence Game: How A Hedge Fund Manager Called Wall Street's Bluff came out in late April, and so far as I can tell it hasn't gotten much review attention from the "major" press outlets. The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Financial Times have all ignored it; I only stumbled upon the book via a mention in John Hempton's Bronte Capital blog.

The lack of attention is a shame, because it's an amazing, amazing book.

Hedge fund manager William Ackman gave author Christine Richard impressive access. She writes, "Ackman gave me a CD-ROM containing every e-mail he had written or received that mentioned MBIA as well as years of appointment calendars and access to an office filled with more than 40 boxes of documents he'd collected in researching MBIA. He encouraged colleagues, advisers, and friends to talk with me and spent hours answering my questions."

James Suroweicki, who wrote an intelligent book about the wisdom of crowds, writing in the New Yorker in favor of higher taxes on those who earn more than $1 million a year:

The explosion in wealth at the very top of the pyramid has given rise to what the commentator Matt Miller has called a "lower upper class"—doctors, lawyers, accountants, even some journalists, who make very good livings but enjoy nothing like the rewards that come to their peers in finance or in the executive suite. The lower upper class exerts a cultural influence out of proportion to its size, and so its anger toward the upper upper class—toward outrageous executive salaries and Wall Street shenanigans—could be a powerful force for reforming the way we deal with inequality.

From Paul Krugman's New York Times op-ed column: "Isn't keeping taxes for the affluent low also a form of stimulus? Not so you'd notice. When we save a schoolteacher's job, that unambiguously aids employment; when we give millionaires more money instead, there's a good chance that most of that money will just sit idle."

Two points in response. First, the claim that the money of millionaire just sits "idle." That's ridiculous. Most millionaires don't keep money in their mattresses. They spend it on cars and houses and private jets and yachts. They invest it in corporate stocks and bonds or in venture capital funds or in private equity funds or real estate partnerships that build businesses that create employment and growth. They deposit the money in banks that make loans to businesses and homeowners. They buy government bonds that fund government spending. The money isn't going to sit idle whether taxes are high or taxes or low; the only question is whether the money will be allocated by private individuals or by politicians.

Job no. 1 for Clark Hoyt: Figure out who wrote the subheadline on the Bloomberg Businessweek cover story: "Most economists agree there's little choice but to end tax cuts from George W. Bush's era." The article makes no mention of any survey of economists on the point, so it's hard to see how it's accurate.

There are other problems with the article. It says, "What Bush and others failed to see was that the Clinton surplus had been a fluke. Capital-gains tax receipts had grown because of the short-lived dot-com boom. A stalemated government was living within its means: Clinton couldn't get spending programs past the Republican-controlled House and Senate and the GOP couldn't get tax cuts past Clinton."

Glenn Hubbard, who is dean of Columbia Business School and was chairman of President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, has a piece in the Wall Street Journal on taxes: "If the Obama administration's goal were truly fairness, it could propose an increase in the average tax rate on higher-income earners without raising marginal rates—for example, by limiting deductions."