The Claremont Review of Books has a review essay by Charles Murray on Ayn Rand: "The two novels have had six-figure annual sales for decades, running at a combined 300,000 copies annually during the past ten years. In 2009, Atlas Shrugged alone sold a record 500,000 copies and Rand's four novels combined (the lesser two are We the Living [1936] and Anthem [1938]) sold more than 1,000,000 copies."

Rep. Bob Etheridge, a Democrat of North Carolina, accurately assesses the political threat posed to him by some college students with video cameras, so he, at least to judge by the video, responds appropriately by attacking one of the students physically.

The Ayn Rand types may not like religion, but they are fond of Israel, at least on the basis of this piece by Craig Biddle from the Summer issue of the Objectivist Standard, on the Gaza flotilla: "America should have advised Israel that if this happens again, she has the full blessing of America to sink the offending ships."

An e-mail resignation letter from the AARP complaining about the "Socialist politics practiced by the Obama administration and empowered by the AARP" has gone viral.

FastCompany picks up a Rasmussen poll on the ideas in the FTC discussion paper on saving the newspaper business:

Of 1,000 adults surveyed over two days this week, 84% of respondents oppose imposing a 3% tax on cell phone calls to provide a fund to prop up the newspaper business and "traditional" journalism. 76% of people opposed a 5% tax on computers, including devices like iPads and Kindles for the same purpose, and 74% opposed a tax on news Web aggregators to help support the "traditional" news services they draw their stories from. A full 71% of respondees opposed the idea of creating a tax-funded program to hire and support young reporters to work in nationwide newspapers, and only 14% of those surveyed supported the notion.

Looks like Steve Brill was right.

The Cato Institute's Gerald O' Driscoll has a piece in the Wall Street Journal about regulatory failure, British Petroleum, and the Gulf of Mexico: "The second source of regulatory failure is the knowledge problem identified by Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek. The knowledge required by regulators is dispersed throughout the industry and broader economy. For regulation to work, that dispersed knowledge must be centralized in the regulatory agency. To successfully accomplish this requires central planning of the industry, if not the economy. But the local knowledge of specific circumstances of time and place cannot be aggregated in one mind or agency. We know that is impossible..."

The Wall Street Journal has an editorial resisting what it calls "Politicizing the Federal Reserve" after "97 years" during which "the 12 regional banks of the Federal Reserve system have operated relatively free of political interference from Washington." It says that "Fed regional presidents are often the main proponents of tight monetary policy" and warns against a proposal it says will be "one way Congress and the White House can intimidate these regional presidents to go along with the policies they favor."

The editorialists accuse Congress of a "brazen attempt to hijack central bank policy" and complain "The law will make it harder for regulators to do what ought to be their main job, which is making sure that they don't again let a credit mania run out of control. It's one more way in which this much vaunted reform will make the financial system even more politicized, and thus more vulnerable to another panic."

J.P. Morgan Chase's private bank has released its annual suggested summer reading list. Recommended titles include Henry Paulson's On The Brink and Life Is What You Make It, by Peter Buffett, son of Warren.

Thanks to FutureOfCapitalism.com reader-community member-participant-watchdog A. for sending the link.

When even Steven Brill, a lecturer in English at Yale who has degrees from Yale College and Yale Law School, is being quoted in the New York Times mocking the idea of "a fund so a bunch of kids from Ivy League colleges can get jobs going to zoning board meetings with pens and pads," it's a sign that the rebellion against the educated elites is spreading even to, well, the educated elites.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers operated by the Corrections Corporation of America will begin offering "movie nights, bingo, arts and crafts, dance and cooking classes," as well as bingo and self-serve beverage bars, the Houston Chronicle reports.

The newspaper quotes the president of the ICE union in Houston, Local 3332, Tre Rebstock, likening the changes to creating "an all-inclusive resort" for immigration detainees. "My grandparents would have loved to have bingo night and a dance class at the retirement home they were in when they passed away, but that was something we would have had to pay for," Mr. Rebstock said, according to the Chronicle. "And yet these guys are getting it on the taxpayers' dime."

From David Carr's New York Times column today: "Journalists in the gulf are now dealing with a hybrid informational apparatus that does not reflect government's legally mandated bias toward openness and transparency." More:

Reporters complained and asked for more accurate, timely information, and a BP official responded with a memorandum saying that the company was prevented from answering individual questions by disclosure rules governing trade in its stock.

"Given recent volatility in BP share price, I'm told that information related to top kill is now considered stock-market sensitive, which means it has to be managed under disclosure rules for the London and N.Y. stock exchanges," the BP media official said in an e-mail message. "In a nutshell, that means all investors must be provided information on an equal basis. That precludes me from sending you updates as various aspects of the operation unfold."

Really? Should the volatility of a company's stock price determine how public information on an environmental disaster be delivered to the public?

Economic Policies for the 21st Century, the new William Kristol-Keith Hennessey economic policy think tank, has an editorial about a Republican alternative to the Democratic tax extenders bill. The alternative is offered by Senator Thune, a Republican of South Dakota. The editorial praises the Thune approach as "encouraging." But the Thune bill would also extend unemployment benefits and provide and extend a "doc fix" of Medicare reimbursement rates for doctors for a year longer than the one Democrats are offering. For that we need Republicans?

A Wall Street Journal blog post floats the idea of taxing "carried interest" "the same way the sale of collectibles, like art or antiques, is taxed." The article declares, "the government's need to raise capital makes some form of tax increase unavoidable."

Columnist Robert Samuelson writes in the Washington Post: "Only 23 percent of the public say President Obama's policies have improved the economy, reports a new Pew survey. By contrast, 29 percent think his policies made matters worse and 38 percent believe they made no difference...the Obama administration's anti-business rhetoric and controversial health 'reform' may have compounded the effect. These policies created uncertainties and fanned partisan rancor. In the case of health 'reform,' they raised the cost of future full-time employees."

Two more new papers from the National Bureau of Economic Research provide some contrarian grist: One finds that a California law mandating a certain nurse-patient staff ratio had no measurable effect on patient safety or outcomes. Another, by Jacob Vigdor and Helen Ladd of Duke University, finds: "the introduction of home computer technology is associated with modest but statistically significant and persistent negative impacts on student math and reading test scores. Further evidence suggests that providing universal access to home computers and high-speed internet access would broaden, rather than narrow, math and reading achievement gaps."