This by J. Robert Smith would be a stronger piece if it cut way back on the name-calling, but it raises some interesting points:

Once government-run health care is a fait accompli, all three [Obama, Reid, Pelosi] believe practical minded Americans will switch from outright opposition to trying to "improve" the government-run health care model, similar to what Americans have done for decades with failing public school systems. Pelosi, Obama, and Reid also know that if they can successfully defy the will of the people and impose government-run health care, if they can then prevent the entitlement from being repealed in its early stages, then this massive program will foster dependency, and dependency entrenches entitlement programs, which keep government powerful and keep the advocates of entitlements in power, give or take the odd election, or until an economy crashes (see Greece...

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USA Today reports: "Federal employees earn higher average salaries than private-sector workers in more than eight out of 10 occupations, a USA TODAY analysis of federal data finds. Accountants, nurses, chemists, surveyors, cooks, clerks and janitors are among the wide range of jobs that get paid more on average in the federal government than in the private sector. Overall, federal workers earned an average salary of $67,691 in 2008 for occupations that exist both in government and the private sector, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The average pay for the same mix of jobs in the private sector was $60,046 in 2008, the most recent data available." This is a reverse Robin-Hood, because the taxes of those private sector workers are being taken to pay for the public sector workers. It also expands on a theme developed recently by both Amity Shlaes and Reason magazine.

The New York Times's Nobel laureate economics columnist, Paul Krugman, has a column today on the question of whether extending unemployment benefits contributes to unemployment. He writes: "Take the question of helping the unemployed in the middle of a deep slump. What Democrats believe is what textbook economics says: that when the economy is deeply depressed, extending unemployment benefits not only helps those in need, it also reduces unemployment....But that's not how Republicans see it. Here's what Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, had to say ...: unemployment relief 'doesn't create new jobs. In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work.' In Mr. Kyl's view, then, what we really need to worry about right now — with more than five unemployed workers for every job opening, and long-term unemployment at its highest level since the Great Depression — is whether we're reducing the incentive of the unemployed to find jobs. To me, that's a bizarre point of view."

Bloomberg News manages to write an entire article about how "Singapore is planning to create its own hedge-fund capital modeled after Greenwich, Connecticut, in a cluster of ex-British army homes called Nepal Hill, a 15- minute cab-ride from the city-state's main banking district" without mentioning taxes, which are one reason hedge funds set up shop in Connecticut rather than New York.

Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, who was forced out of the company he built, AIG, by regulators and then paid $15 million to settle with the SEC, has an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal calling for giving regulators even more power and raising their pay. Also: "The rating agencies should be independent, licensed institutions, and the people who do the rating should be vetted to ensure that they have the appropriate background and abilities. This may mean going so far as bringing the rating agencies under an independent government institution and thus removing any profit incentive." Yeah, that's right -- if you license people and remove their profit incentive and put them to work for the government, they'll definitely do a better job. Right?

One of the emerging themes of this Web site is that religion plays a greater role than is widely recognized in people's attitudes toward capitalism. We've touched on this in the reviews of Capitalism and the Jews and The Israel Test and in the post on PIGS Without Jews. (As an aside, my biography of Samuel Adams makes the case that religion played an important role in the American Revolution.)

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The Templeton Foundation hosted an online discussion on the question: "Does the free market corrode moral character?" At least eight of the 13 respondents work for non-profit organizations. The Manhattan Institute's Kay Hymowitz answered "Yes, too often," and was particularly scathing about the Internet: "today the Internet is usurping television's long-held status as the chief sponsor of hedonism, materialism, and anarchic egotism." The whole thing is worth a read or a watch, but it seems to me the question itself is skewed. Why don't they ask if government interventions in free markets corrode moral character, or if socialism corrodes moral character? The Templeton Foundation has a lot of money to give away ("Roughly $1.5 billion in assets" ) and has seen some recent staff turnover. Link via the American Enterprise Institute's blog.

The March 2010 issue of Reason magazine has an article by Brian Doherty about how Murray Rothbard, a libertarian thinker and activist who influenced the Cato Institute and the Von Mises Institute, wrote that F.A. Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty was "surprisingly and distressingly, an extremely bad, and, I would even say, evil book." A somewhat obscure feud, but worth a read for those who have followed previous coverage here of Hayek.

The Patients' Choice Act proposed by four Republicans does a better job than ObamaCare at including the cost-control ideas of Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. So writes Peter Nelson of the Center of the American Experiment.

Since 1969, New York City has, as a matter of law, been suffering from "an acute housing shortage" that constitutes a "grave emergency." Now a judge, at the behest of the city's building department, has barred a residential architect from practice for "deliberately overbuilding." The New York Times reports that the architect, Robert Scarano, was cited for submitting misleading statements "in order to build bigger structures than were permitted." With the government restricting the size of apartment buildings -- i.e., the supply of apartments -- to prevent "overbuilding," is it any surprise that there is a housing shortage? Instead of allowing property owners to build big apartment buildings, the city spends money on "affordable housing" to try to correct for the lack of supply. Yet again, it takes a government program to undo the effects of another government program.

The New York Times waddles in today with an obituary of Arnold Beichman, whose death was noted here back on February 17. The Times obit ends as follows:

Socialism is dictatorship, he told Columbia College Today, the alumni magazine, in 2005. "The control of wealth is the control over human life," he said. "So if a centrally planned economy decides how wealth is to be created and how it is to be distributed, then they really have a control over human life."

Bloomberg News is taking off the gloves with Rupert Murdoch, to judge by today's article headlined "Murdoch's Losses on Supermarket Coupons Near 'Avatar' Earnings" and accompanied by a particularly unflattering photograph of Mr. Murdoch. The article is about a News Corp. unit called News America Marketing. A rival company sued it, alleging that "News Corp. employees threatened smaller rivals, destroyed signs in supermarkets and broke into computers to steal trade secrets." Between the alleged breaking into computers in America and the alleged phone-tapping in Britain, it's not looking too good.

"…commercial real estate loans should not be marked down because the collateral value has declined. It depends on the income from the property, not the collateral value." Ben Bernanke, Feb. 24, 2009

Brian Wesbury makes the point: "It would have been much better for the economy if Chairman Bernanke had been this clear about mark-to-market accounting back in 2008. If he had been, the US might have avoided the Panic of 2008."