From a New York Times brief on the departure of a deputy under secretary at the federal department of education: "Mr. Shireman has been seen as such an important figure in the department's effort to regulate for-profit higher education that the word of his departure, late Monday, caused stocks of the publicly traded higher education companies to soar." Is this really the kind of country we want? When the news of the departure of not an elected president, not a cabinet secretary, not an under secretary, but a bureacrat with the title of deputy under secretary is enough to affect hundreds of millions of dollars of the valuations of publicly traded companies?

The Huffington Post has some excellent coverage of Senator Harkin's amendment to cap ATM fees at 50 cents. While they're at it why not cap house prices at $250,000 (but only for people who don't yet own them), restaurant meals at $9.99, cars at $10,000, and gas at $1.99 a gallon? Or better yet, if the politicians are going to cut ATM fees from $2 to 50 cents, why don't they also cut their own source of revenue, taxes, by three quarters as well? No one likes ATM fees, but consumers who pay attention can usually avoid the fees by going to the bank where they have an account or by banking with a bank that reimburses the ATM fees charged by other banks.

Thomas Frank waddles in with a column in the Wall Street Journal about Senator Jim DeMint's book, which was reviewed here all the way back on June 25, 2009.

Bloomberg News has a report on the legal maneuvering in the Securities and Exchange Commission's civil case against Goldman Sachs:

Goldman Sachs was negotiating to hire the Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP law firm to help defend it in the case.

Negotiations Terminated

The discussions, which started this month, were terminated last week and Goldman Sachs doesn't plan to hire another law firm instead, a person briefed on the matter said, speaking anonymously because the talks were private.

Facebook, which was founded in 2004, should get ready to become a highly regulated industry like water or electricity, writes a PhD researcher for Microsoft who is also a fellow at Harvard, Danah Boyd:

I'm not going to give up water, power, sewage, or the Internet out of spite. Nor will most people give up Facebook, regardless of how much they grow to hate them. Your gut reaction might be to tell me that Facebook is not a utility. You're wrong. People's language reflects that people are depending on Facebook just like they depended on the Internet a decade ago....And here's where we get to the meat of why Facebook being a utility matters. Utilities get regulated. Less in the United States than in any other part of the world.

European regulators are beating up on Google the way that American regulators beat up on Toyota.

The Hayek Center has posted a video from November 1978 of Robert Bork and F.A. Hayek discussing intellectuals. Judge Bork sees something "a little more sinister" in the trend "towards more regulation, towards more intervention, towards more politicization of the economy." Professor Hayek says, in a thick Austrian accent, that intellectuals are repelled by an idea if it is easily intelligible. Both men seem blissfully unaware that they, too, are intellectuals.

One of the themes we've been harping on around here is that government jobs have started to pay more than private sector jobs do. For previous posts on the topic see here, here, here, here and here. The latest example is a former editor of the New Republic, Peter Beinart, who, in his role as an associate professor at the City University of New York -- not a full professor, mind you, an associate professor -- is taking home from the taxpayers of New York, according to the useful Manhattan Institute-sponsored Web site SeeThroughNy, the tidy sum of $143,235 a year. That is, according to the latest survey from the American Association of University Professors, more than $30,000 a year more than an average associate professor at Harvard, which has an endowment of billions of dollars.

Reuters has a dispatch about a speech in Boston by fund manager Seth Klarman, whose Baupost Group has been very successful. From the story:

Current market conditions remind Klarman of a Hostess Twinkie snack cake because "everything is being manipulated by the government" and appears "artificial."

"I'm more worried about the world broadly than I've ever been in my whole career," Klarman said.

When I was growing up in Massachusetts, the Boston Globe basically owned the coverage of the Massachusetts sports teams. Now ESPN has a whole Web site devoted to Boston sports, with articles like this long piece by Howard Bryant on the struggles of Red Sox slugger David Ortiz. At any point during my youth, some government regulator could have stepped in and said, you know what, the Globe has too many of the best sportswriters, and too much of a market share of sports news, and we are going to intervene break it up. But they didn't. And what happened? New competitors entered the market. Sometimes what seems like a position of unassailable market dominance is eroded not by regulatory intervention but by time and free-market competition.

The University of Chicago's John Cochrane has an article in the Wall Street Journal about Greece that is well worth reading.

The Wall Street Journal has a news article up this morning about Walmart's latest results. "For the period ended April 30, Wal-Mart reported a profit of $3.32 billion, or 88 cents a share, up from $3.02 billion, or 77 cents a share, a year earlier," the article says, noting that the 88 cents a share exceeded the company's February projection of 81 cents to 85 cents a share. The article also reports "Revenue rose 5.9% to $99.1 billion. Analysts had forecast $98.45 billion."

So what are the focus of the headline and the lead paragraph of the article? Not the increases in profits or revenues, but the bad news. The headline is, "Wal-Mart Same-Store Sales Fall." The second paragraph of the article begins, "First-quarter sales at stores open more than a year at Wal-Mart's domestic locations fell for the fourth consecutive quarter." That isn't even clear -- is it the fourth consecutive first quarter in which sales dropped, or just the fourth consecutive quarter?

The Manhattan Institute wants to end merit pay linked to student test scores for teachers and principals in New York City public schools. Usually "conservatives" favor such merit pay programs and the Manhattan Institute is usually "conservative" so this is somewhat surprising. But the Manhattan Institute also wants to force derivatives onto exchanges, limit borrowing, and make all financial enterprises adhere to strict capital requirements, so at a certain point surprising becomes not as surprising. At least they're not doctrinaire ideologues like we are here at FutureOfCapitalism!

Amity Shlaes says the new movie has an anti-tax message.

The New York Post has an update reporting that the plan is to phase in the increase over 10 years.