Short-selling hedge fund manager Steven Eisman's campaign against for-profit educational institutions has been the topic of earlier coverage here, here, and here. Now ProPublica, a non-profit news organization that has been critical of the for-profit colleges, turns against Mr. Eisman with a terrific story disclosing that a researcher for a short-selling fund (it's not clear if it is Mr. Eisman's) rounded up 20 homeless shelter managers to sign a letter the researcher had drafted to the federal secretary of Education complaining that "for-profit trade schools and career colleges are systematically preying upon our clients." Some of the homeless-shelter managers say they didn't know that the woman who drafted and circulated the letter was working for a financial firm that had a stake in the outcome.

Anyone who says it's just the Democrats and not the Republicans who are the problem in Washington should have a look at this Dodd-Frank financial "reform" legislation, which, as Bloomberg News reports, appears headed for passage on the basis of votes from three Republican senators — Scott Brown of Massachusetts and Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine.

Over on the House side, we've had some comments about the man in line to be speaker if Republicans take over, John Boehner.

A Republican majority in Congress after the 2010 election is not the same thing as a free-market majority.

There's got to be a considerable amount of "buyer's remorse" out there now from people who gave money to Scott Brown's campaign but are disappointed that he'll be backing Dodd-Frank. It'll be interesting to see how much of it surfaces publicly.

Politico: "Workplace safety experts say that if Congress were a private-sector business, it would be at risk for massive fines from government regulators. But Congress has exempted itself from key parts of federal workplace law. As a result, several of the Labor Department's powerful Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations have never applied to the legislative branch."

Thomas Sowell: "Not only has all the runaway spending and rapid escalation of the deficit to record levels failed to make any real headway in reducing unemployment, all this money pumped into the economy has also failed to produce inflation....There may not be any inflation now, but eventually that money is going to start moving, and so will the price level."

The Washington Monthly has an unflattering but perhaps illuminating profile of the Chamber of Commerce and its CEO, Thomas Donohue: "Oddly, while Donohue casts himself as the voice of business, he has never worked for a corporation or any kind of for-profit concern—only for trade associations, nonprofits, and the federal government." The chamber backed the stimulus bill and "has chided Republican lawmakers for not supporting subsidies for alternative energy."

More: "What becomes clear from observing Donohue's record is that, for all his opposition to federal oversight, he is a quintessential creature of Washington. Like the head of any bureaucracy or agency, he measures his success far less by results than by the size of his budget."

Link via The Browser.

The New York Times today publishes an opinion piece complaining about what it calls "the increasing use of so-called dynasty trusts. These estate-planning instruments enable affluent people to provide their heirs with money and property largely free from taxes and immune to the claims of creditors. And rather than benefit only children and grandchildren, dynasty trusts provide for generations in perpetuity — truly creating an American aristocracy."

The Times article goes on: "An ordinary trust dissipates as money is distributed to the beneficiaries. But a dynasty trust can avoid this by discouraging outright distributions and instead encouraging trustees to buy, for the use of the beneficiaries, things like houses, artwork, airplanes and even businesses."

Even businesses! The horror of having a business controlled by a family trust! The op-ed recommends that Congress should "fix the problem."

It could start by looking at the 2010 proxy statement of the New York Times Company:

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat discovers what we call around here Reverse Robin-Hood, and also concedes the point we made earlier (as he puts it), "Just because you have a million-dollar mortgage doesn't make you a millionaire, and a lot of the fat-cat defaulters probably aren't that fat anymore."

Mr. Douthat goes off course, though, in my view, when he writes:

This isn't just a corporate welfare problem. The same pattern is at work in our entitlement system, which is lurching toward bankruptcy in part because of how much Medicare and Social Security pay to seniors who could get along without assistance. Instead of a safety net that protects the elderly from poverty, we have a system in which the American taxpayer is effectively underwriting cruises and tee times...

The New York Times, which routinely runs news articles based on anonymous sources and goes to court to defend reporters against efforts to compel the disclosure of the identity of such sources, has an editorial today in favor of a law "forcing mystery donors to come forward on their ads." So by the Times's lights, you can affect the public agenda by anonymously talking to its reporters, but not by anonymously purchasing a television commercial or by anonymously giving money to an organization that buys a commercial. Seems like an pretty fine distinction.

The Wall Street Journal has a news-section article on the idea of a federal value-added tax, a topic we've been covering here for some time. The part of the Journal article that drew my attention was this:

"If you're looking for more revenue, I think raising rates under the current income tax probably is not a good idea and could do significant economic harm," says Eric Toder, a co-director of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center think tank. By contrast, a VAT "doesn't interfere with where goods are produced...and doesn't interfere with savings, investment and capital formation."

For 180-degree opposite views of the Google-China conflict, check out Gordon Crovitz's column in the Wall Street Journal this morning and a Bloomberg News piece masquerading as a news article. Mr. Crovitz portrays Google as the winner, in a "surprising victory":

Beijing compromised. It let Google continue to operate in China if it tweaked its mainland search box by asking users if they still want to be sent to the Hong Kong site. This is a minor inconvenience, and one that will constantly remind mainland Chinese they can choose between the censored and uncensored Internet, a marketing benefit to Google that advertising can't buy.

CNN Money publishes a piece warning of the red tape that is part of ObamaCare:

The new regulations, which kick in at the start of 2012, require any taxpayer with business income to issue 1099 forms to all vendors from whom they purchased more than $600 of goods and services that year. That promises to launch a fusillade of new paperwork: An estimated 40 million taxpayers will be subject to the requirement, including 26 million who run sole proprietorships, according to a report released this week by National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson....

"The new reporting burden, particularly as it falls on small businesses, may turn out to be disproportionate as compared with any resulting improvement in tax compliance," the Taxpayer Advocate Service wrote in a report released this week.

Liberty Media chairman John Malone has a lively interview with the Wall Street Journal:

WSJ: What are you doing to protect against the weak American economy?

Mr. Malone: Well, my wife, who is very concerned about these things, moved all her personal cash to Australia and Canada. She wants to have a place to go if things blow up here.

Canada has a lot more fiscal and bank responsibility than most places in the world and lots of natural resources.

We have a retreat that's right on the Quebec border. We own 18 miles on the border, so we can cross. Anytime we want to we can get away.

It would probably be illegal but we could go. ...

WSJ: Do you have faith in the dollar?

Mr. Malone: None. ..

WSJ: Do you think President Obama should be re-elected?

One of the points we've been making around here is that attitudes toward religion and toward capitalism often go together, or, to put a finer point on it, anti-Semitism and anti-capitalism often go hand in hand. The latest example: Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, whose state-owned press is described in a Miami Herald op-ed as: "On official TV or radio in Caracas, the anchor rants about boycotting companies allegedly owned by Zionists, such as Coca-Cola and Johnson & Johnson."

Not that it's any picnic for Venezuelan Catholics, either; the newspaper El Universal reports from Caracas that Jorge Cardinal Urosa Savino

The Monday Note takes a look at newspaper subsidies in Europe and finds, essentially, that the countries where newspapers get the biggest subsidies from the government are the ones where readers seem the least interested in reading newspapers:

The OECD data show too many subsidies lead to low operating profit, no workforce adjustments and decreasing readership.

Italy and France are the perfect examples. Compared to Sweden, Italy has 4 times less readers par 1000 people but 12 times more subsidies per reader.

For France, the numbers are slightly better: 3 times less readers than Sweden and 5 times more direct subsidies (according to a conservative estimates, 10% of the revenue of the French dailies comes from public funding). ...

In fact, in Europe, the soundest newspaper economy is the British one: no direct subsidies, only a VAT at zero (like in Finland and Norway).

McDonald's CEO Jim Skinner is pushing back pretty hard in response to an advocacy group's demand that it stop including toys with its Happy Meals. "Parents, in particular, strongly believe they have the right and responsibility to decide what's best for their children," Mr. Skinner writes. The advocacy group had likened McDonald's to "the stranger in the playground handing out candy to children."

The blogger Soccer Dad praises Mr. Skinner's response, as does the American Council of Science and Health.