Thomas Sowell has a new column dissecting the president's comment that "at some point, you have made enough money." He writes: "There is nothing wrong with my deciding how much money is enough for me or your deciding how much money is enough for you, but when politicians think that they should be deciding how much money is enough for other people, that is starting down a very slippery slope." He goes on:

The moral bankruptcy of the notion that third parties can decide when somebody else has "enough" money is matched by its economic illiteracy. The rest of the country is not poorer by the amount of Bill Gates' fortune today and was not poorer by the amount of John D. Rockefeller's fortune a century ago.

Both men were selling a product that others were also selling, but more people chose to buy theirs. Those people would not have voluntarily continued to pay their hard-earned money for Rockefeller's oil or Gates' software if what they received was not worth more to them than what they paid.

Republican National Committee direct mail fundraising letters that look deceptively like census documents have been the focus of earlier posts here and here. The non-profit news organization ProPublica and the for-profit news organization Politico have also covered the issue, prompting the House of Representatives to go so far as to vote to restrict the practice.

The New Yorker has a 7,000-word profile of Andrew Breitbart, whose Breitbart.com "is currently looked at by an average of 2.4 million people a month, according to Quantcast.com." He says, "when the entire media is structured to attack conservatives and Republicans, there is a huge business model to come in and counterbalance that."

One more thought regarding Paul Krugman's column today complaining about what he calls the "radicalism" of Republicans. When was it, exactly, that "radicalism" became a pejorative term on the American left? It makes a reader want to send Professor Krugman a copy of Gordon Wood's book on The Radicalism of the American Revolution.

The New York Times's Nobel-prize-winning economics columnist, Paul Krugman, writes, "it's becoming ever more apparent that real power within the G.O.P. rests with the ranting talk-show hosts." Then Mr. Krugman himself rants, "the new Maine platform is if anything a bit milder than the Texas Republican platform of 2000, which called not just for eliminating the Federal Reserve but also for returning to the gold standard, for killing not just the Department of Education but also the Environmental Protection Agency, and more. Somehow, though, the radicalism of Texas Republicans wasn't a story in 2000, an election year in which George W. Bush of Texas, soon to become president, was widely portrayed as a moderate."

The country managed to get along without an EPA until the 1970s, when the agency was created by President Nixon. Often, the definition of a ranting radical is in the eye of the beholder.

"Republicans introduced a new argument against Elena Kagan's nomination today, suggesting she believes in banning books," the Hill newspaper reported Sunday, covering Senator Mitch McConnell's appearance on "Meet The Press." (Link via Chris Stirewalt of the Washington Examiner, who led his "Morning Must Reads" dispatch with the Hill article.)

Bloomberg News has an interview with David Koch, a businessman and philanthropist whose net worth the wire says is estimated by Forbes at $17.5 billion. Mr. Koch will be honored tonight by Michelle Obama at the American Ballet Theatre's opening gala. The article goes on about ballet and Mr. Koch's other charitable interests, which include prostate cancer and the dinosaur wing of the American Museum of Natural History. But for our purposes the key quotes come lower down in the story:

Koch said he's concerned about the impact of U.S. federal tax increases on future charitable donations. Next year, income- tax rates for the highest earners will go up to 39.6 percent up from 35 percent, and the capital-gains tax will rise to 20 percent from 15 percent.

"Those increases will be detrimental to wealthy people to give to nonprofits," he said.

Think the American social safety net is stingy and full of holes compared to Europe's? Think again. University of Arizona economist Price Fishback has a new paper out from the National Bureau of Economic Research headlined, "Social Welfare Expenditures in the United States and the Nordic Countries, 1900-2003." From the abstract: "The common view that America spends much less on social welfare than the Nordic countries does not survive closer inspection....Per capita net public social expenditures in the U.S. rank behind only Sweden. Add in the private spending, and per capita spending in the U.S. is higher than in all of the Nordic countries."

Amid all the vilification of banks comes a reminder that they play an important role, at least if you like cities. Clemson University's Howard Bodenhorn and David Cuberes have a new working paper posted at the National Bureau of Economic Research headlined, "Financial development and City Growth: Evidence From Northeastern American Cities, 1790-1870." From the abstract: "Our estimates suggest that the presence of a bank at a given location increases its subsequent growth by one to two percentage points per year. Because urban growth was correlated with economic development in the nineteenth-century US, we believe our results provide further support for the finance-growth nexus."

From the president's weekly address: "I just wanted to take a few minutes to talk about why every American has a stake in Wall Street reform. First and foremost, you have a stake in it if you've ever been treated unfairly by a credit card company, misled by pages and pages of fine print, or ended up paying fees and penalties you'd never heard of before. And you have a stake in it if you've ever tried to take out a home loan, a car loan, or a student loan, and been targeted by the predatory practices of unscrupulous lenders."

A FutureOfCapitalism reader writes in response:

Predatory lending—what is the definition of it?

Can you force somebody to borrow money?

Most attempts to prevent "predatory lending" or "usury" usually end up with people who want or need credit not getting it. They also end up protecting the interests of the most powerful, usually the dominant banks and financial institutions.

George Will writes on Europe: "The EU has a flag no one salutes, an anthem no one sings, a president no one can name, a parliament (in Strasbourg) no one other than its members wants to have power (which must subtract from the powers of national legislatures), a capital (Brussels) of coagulated bureaucracy no one admires or controls, a currency that presupposes what neither does nor should nor soon will exist (a European central government), and rules of fiscal behavior that no member has been penalized for ignoring."

Has Bloomberg News been changed by the inclusion of Businessweek? Or has Businessweek been changed by its new Bloomberg ownership?

Either way, it's not looking like a particularly healthy development for those who appreciated Bloomberg's traditional "Just the facts, ma'am" approach.

We already noted a Bloomberg Businessweek article written by a former Mother Jones contributor that began by observing, "Before Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs took his place, Richard S. Fuld Jr.'s angry face was the universal symbol of Wall Street greed."

The Heritage Foundation notices a comment by the Governor of Montana, Brian Schweitzer, a Democrat:

after being pressed a third time about whether the state mandated spending in Obamacare would bankrupt his state, Schweitzer predicted: "[The spending] is kicked down the road. And if you believe that this bill is not going to change between now and '17, '18, and '19, when a lot of this kicks in, then you are smoking your own belly button lint."

Bloomberg News has an early look from Cannes at Oliver Stone's "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps": "Gekko discovers that he and Jake have a common love -- Winnie -- and a common enemy: the powerful banker Bretton James (Josh Brolin), whose firm Churchill Schwartz has powerful backers in the U.S. administration. Jake goes to work for Churchill Schwartz after his own firm's demise." I wonder why they chose the Jewish-sounding name Schwartz rather than something stereotypically, say, Irish or Italian?