The ambush interview of Rep. Bob Etheridge of North Carolina has inspired a Commentary blog post by John Steele Gordon on a 19th-century ambush interview by a reporter with William Henry Vanderbilt, who controlled the New York Central Railroad:

"Mr. Vanderbilt, are you working for the public or for your stockholders?"

"The public be damned! I am working for my stockholders! If the public want the train, why don't they support it?"

Thanks to FutureOfCapitalism reader-participant-watchdog-partner-content-co-creator DG for sending the link.

The other thing that's kind of weird about the White House's tips on how to be a good father is that they are written from a kind of anonymous authoritative voice. There's no visible indication, really, of who generated each idea, or how, and no mechanism for people to suggest their own ideas. It's so not Web 2.0, so lacking in recognition of the wisdom of crowds or of Hayek's insight about how knowledge is dispersed. There's no way to share the tips via Twitter or Facebook.

The earlier post here about Fatherhood.gov is driving the left totally bonkers and illuminating a lack of reading comprehension among some of its intellectuals. The American Prospect claims, "Stoll was angry that Obama's email and website took time out of his Father's Day, but his evening post on the subject took time as well." The New Republic writes, "I can see why Stoll was upset that the government set off his email buzzer, and was further upset by a message that could easily be interpreted as a federal demand that he leave his children and look at a website immediately. What I don't understand is why he proceeded to ignore his children further by composing a column on Father's Day."

So long as we're on the topic of University of Chicago economists, National Public Radio has an interview with University of Chicago economist Raghu Rajan, running under the headline "Social Inequality Helped Stoke Financial Crisis." Professor Rajan is promoting his new book. On the basis of the NPR piece, the argument is a bit of a moving target. It's hard to distill what's NPR and what is Professor Rajan, but the introduction to the piece suggests the idea that the financial crisis wasn't caused simply by "inadequate regulation" or "greedy bankers" but by "social inequality."

The University of Chicago's John Cochrane has an important, somewhat technical, new paper (pdf) out headlined, "Understanding Fiscal and Monetary Policy in the Great Recession: Some Unpleasant Fiscal Arithmetic." Some non-technical highlights:

a fiscal inflation may well look like a stock market collapse. The tipping point... can come quickly and unpredictably... It can come as a surprise to a Federal Reserve and to economists unused to thinking about fiscal limits to monetary policy....Where is the fiscal limit? I don't know. But there is a fiscal limit, and wherever it is, we are a few trillion dollars closer to it than we were last year, and we will be another few trillion dollars closer next year. ..it is closer than we think....

The volume of popular press coverage of deficits and inflation — clearly about expected future inflation — and even the ads for gold on cable TV suggest at least a more widespread concern about inflation than has been present for some time.

Bloomberg News has a dispatch about an Australian local government that is suing after buying a "constant proportion debt obligation, or CPDO," named "Rembrandt," which, according to the Bloomberg article "lost 93 percent of its value in two years."

The article is remarkable on at least two fronts. First, the forthrightness with which the news article takes a side in the debate over the regulation of derivatives:

Over the last decade the financial industry justified the rapid growth in products such as CPDOs, collateralized debt obligations and credit-default swaps by arguing that they were sold to qualified investors who understood the risks and were able to bear them. Their view was echoed in July 1998 Senate testimony by then-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who said that "regulation of derivatives transactions that are privately negotiated by professionals is unnecessary."

Another bad parenting tip from President Obama's new Fatherhood.gov Web site: "Spring cleaning will be off to a great start if you first tackle that list of home improvement chores with your children. Little ones can find the hammer, wrench, or pliers in a toolbox while older kids can learn how to repair household items." I don't know about your toolbox, but mine is full of sharp things like drillbits, nails, and a box-cutter. Does the government really want to be telling parents to have their "little ones" (age undefined) messing around in toolboxes?

A Zionist Organization of America notices that President Obama has increased American taxpayer-provided foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority to $1,300,000,000.00 a year, as the ZOA press release puts it, "DOUBLE THE AMOUNT President George W. Bush gave to the PA."

From the comments thread on a Brooklyn Papers news article about a vandalism attack on a BP service station in Williamsburg, Brooklyn: "A few years ago I worked for an environmental advocacy organization, and they would only fill the company cars at BP because the company was seen as being forward-looking on green technology. Seems stupid now, but I think the BP ("Beyond" petroleum) rebrand really worked on people."

Plus, they advertised in the Nation.

President Obama interrupted my Father's Day with an e-mail announcing the launch of "The President's Fatherhood and Mentoring Initiative" and an associated Web site, Fatherhood.gov, which honestly I could have mistaken for an elaborate prank undertaken by some libertarian group trying to make the point that the next thing you know, Big Government and President Obama are going to try to insert themselves into the father-son or father-daughter relationship. Except that, sure enough, at the bottom of the Web site is language announcing, "This is an official U.S. Government Web site managed by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services."

So I ignored my children for a few minutes of Father's Day and did what the president asked which was to check out the Web site, and especially the government's "Tips for Parents." They were infuriating.

The Wall Street Journal's Heard on the Street Column reports: "Eric Cantor, the Republican Whip in the House of Representatives, bought up to $15,000 in shares of ProShares Trust Ultrashort 20+ Year Treasury ETF last December, according to his 2009 financial disclosure statement. The exchange-traded fund takes a short position in long-dated government bonds. In effect, it is a bet against U.S. government bonds—and perhaps on inflation in the future."

Bloomberg News has a column and the Financial Times has an editorial on Australia's attempt to impose a new 40% tax on mining profits.

Here is how the Bloomberg column, by William Pesek, frames the issue, in a column headlined "Billionaires Dig In to Kill Good Economic Idea":

This, after all, is hardly the evil, capitalism-killing idea that's been portrayed. The tax would be on "super profits," or anything over a level deemed reasonable. Under Rudd's proposal, the levy would be imposed on resource-company returns that exceed the rate on long-term Australian government bonds, currently about 6 percent....The public-relations battle is clearly being won by the billionaires. To listen to the miners, Rudd's tax is an assault on Australia's future. No, just them and their monster profits. Rudd is putting Australians first, and good for him.

The Manhattan Institute's Nicole Gelinas, writing on the City Journal Web site, makes a good point:

In announcing that BP will gradually fund a $20 billion escrow fund for Gulf oil-gusher victims, President Obama said something odd: "BP is a strong and viable company and it is in all our interests that it remains so."

The president has no particular insight on whether BP, a private company, is "strong and viable."..In fact, if it turns out BP can't regain the sustained confidence of investors, it's very much in our national interest that markets render that verdict uncontaminated by government interference that goes beyond time-tested legal channels, whether it's to defend BP or to bully it.

Whatever Rep. Joe Barton, the top Republican on the House energy committee, may say, the Republican leadership of the House is emphatic that President Obama's extraction of $20 billion from BP was not a "shakedown." Here is how the New York Times describes the reaction of the Republican leadership:

Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House Republican leader, and Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the Republican whip, summoned Mr. Barton and he "was told to apologize, immediately, or he would lose his spot, immediately," a senior aide said. ...

When Mr. Barton soon did issue a statement of contrition, Mr. Boehner's office also distributed it, for added effect. Then Mr. Boehner, Mr. Cantor and another party leader, Representative Mike Pence of Indiana, together publicly rebuked their colleague.

Bloomberg News's Matthew Lynn doesn't pull any punches in his assessment of the Congressional hearing on BP, likening it to "a Stalinist show trial" and an "undignified charade" and calling the congressmen a "posturing lynch mob."