Public sector pay more generous than private sector pay has been a regular topic around here. The New York Times got a piece of the story over the weekend with an article about the pension piece of public sector compensation, reporting that "about 3,700 retired public workers in New York are now getting pensions of more than $100,000 a year, exempt from state and local taxes" and that "Roughly one of every 250 retired public workers in New York is collecting a six-figure pension, and that group is expected to grow rapidly in coming years, based on the number of highly paid people in the pipeline."

The Amerian Enterprise Institute's Kevin Hassett has a new Bloomberg News article up about how the Senate passage of the financial "reform" bill caused a plunge in the stock market:

Our feckless leaders, the modern-day gang that couldn't shoot straight, targeted their policy weapons at Wall Street but hit Main Street. Big financial firms such as JPMorgan Chase & Co. (down 3.9 percent) and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (down 2.9 percent) fell roughly in proportion with the overall Dow Jones Industrial Average, which declined 3.6 percent on Dodd's big day. By contrast, some companies that actually sell things to people plummeted: Ford Motor Co., down 6.5 percent; Timberland Co., down 8.8 percent; Sears Holdings Corp., down 11 percent.

One "cause of market pessimism," Mr Hassett writes, "is the likely impact of Democrats' financial reform on the cost of doing business for nonfinancial firms":

The Atlantic has an interesting piece from Joe Cloud, the owner of a small slaughterhouse in Virginia called True & Essential Meats, about how "Small, community-based meat processing plants" have become casualties of "the challenge of meeting the Byzantine demands of USDA regulations without a Ph.D. in microbiology." He writes, "The proposal recommends testing for testing's sake, and it will cost small plants tens of thousands of dollars, perhaps even hundreds of thousands, every year. The financial burden appears great enough that this will destroy much of the remaining community-based meat processing industry, which is enjoying a renaissance and creating jobs."

One of the problems with regulation, whether it is of meat processing or of the chemicals in the paint used to paint the lines on roads, is that to manage the cost of compliance you need to be a big business.

The Atlantic has an article calculating the net worth of all 43 presidents of the United States, at their peak value, in 2010 dollars.

Thanks to reader-contributor-co-creator-participant-community member F. for sending the link.

The chief executive of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Thomas Donohue, gives an interview to the Wall Street Journal warning that, as the Journal puts it, "American companies are becoming more comfortable with the U.S. Congress taking a role in trying to level the playing field for businesses in China."

The Senate Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on antitrust, competition policy, and consumer rights will hold a hearing Thursday afternoon on the merger between United and Continental Airlines. Senator Schumer is a member of the subcommittee, so the event should give him an opportunity to press the all-important (to Mr. Schumer, at least) carry-on-baggage fee issue.

The president of the American Enterprise Institute, Arthur Brooks, author of The Battle: How the Fight Between Free Enterprise and Big Government Will Shape America's Future, has a long article in the Washington Post about the culture war between free enterprise and government control:

Free enterprise brings happiness; redistribution does not. The reason is that only free enterprise brings earned success.

The Financial Times has an article on Silicon Valley opposition to raising the tax on "carried interest." You can see the groundwork starting to be laid for a carve-out or exemption for venture capital. The FT quotes a managing director at Scale Venture Partners, Kate Mitchell:

she said that the venture capital community represented just one 16th of the revenues this bill would target. "We're a really small part of the picture. Most of the revenue is generated by other asset classes."

"Traffic Paint Shortage Threatens Roadwork," is the headline over an article in today's New York Times.

Since free markets are generally pretty good at creating supply to meet demand, whenever I see a news article about a "shortage," I look for a government intervention. The Times article doesn't provide a report of such a government intervention, but it does provide a clue; the key paragraph is here:

The scarcity stems in large part from the shortage of an obscure chemical compound called methyl methacrylate, one of the key ingredients in roadworthy paint, which must be sturdy, long-lasting and reflective. A major producer of the compound, Dow Construction Chemicals, had production problems this year at a plant in Deer Park, Tex. Other companies scaled back production during the economic downturn, said Phil Phillips, the managing director of the Chemark Consulting Group, which analyzes the coatings industry.

Why do the Chinese save so much? A new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research by Columbia University's Qingyuan Du and Shang-Jin Wei proposes, as the abstract puts it, "a theory of excess savings based on a major, albeit insufficiently recognized by macroeconomists, transformation in many of these societies, namely, a steady increase in the surplus of men relative to women." The authors write, "We show conditions under which an intensified competition in the marriage market can induce men to raise their savings rate, and produce a rise in the aggregate savings and current account surplus. This effect is economically significant if the biological desire to have a partner of the opposite sex is strong."

They say that the gender imbalance, driven in part by the "one-child" policy, may be responsible for more than half of China's current account imbalance.

Michael Barone has a new column: "What we are seeing is a spontaneous rush of previously inactive citizens into political activity, a movement symbolized but not limited to the Tea Party movement, in response to the vast increases in federal spending..."

Monday's Wall Street Journal has a good op-ed piece on why raising taxes on "carried interest" of investment managers is a bad idea, and an editorial arguing that Rand Paul was wrong about the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The professor at SUNY Binghamton, Ali al-Amin Mazrui, who is under fire from Campus Watch for espousing "classic anti-Semitism" and "racial stereotypes" at a Columbia University conference, makes $172,468 a year, according to Seethroughny.net.

The Sunday New York Times waddles in with a review of Daniel Okrent's book on Prohibition, Last Call, which we reviewed here back on May 11.

The Wall Street Journal has a pretty good news article on Kentucky Senate candidate Ron Paul's constitutional conservatism, focusing less on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than on two FDR-era Supreme Court decisions. The first was in "1937, when the Supreme Court, under heated pressure from President Franklin Roosevelt, upheld a state minimum-wage law on a 5-4 vote, ushering in the legal justification for government intervention in private markets. Until the case, West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, the Supreme Court had sharply limited government action that impinged on the private sector." The second was "Wickard v. Filburn, in which the Supreme Court rejected the claims of farmer Roscoe Filburn that wheat he grew for his own use was beyond the reach of federal regulation. The 1942 ruling upheld federal laws limiting wheat production, saying Mr. Filburn's crop affected interstate commerce. Even if he fed his wheat to his own livestock, the court reasoned, he was implicitly affecting wheat prices."