"The President vowed in 2008 that he wouldn't raise taxes on anyone earning less than $250,000 a year, but that's looking to be as forlorn a hope as peace in Palestine," the Wall Street Journal says in an editorial today. That's a clunker, given that there is no place on the map now called Palestine -- there's Israel and there's the Palestinian Authority. And also given that the past decades have seen the conclusion of peace treaties between Israel and Egypt and between Israel and Jordan, and that the past year has been so far, thankfully, free of large-scale suicide bombings of Israeli discos, restaurants, and shopping malls.

The editor of the collected works of F.A. Hayek, Bruce Caldwell, participated in an interview with FutureOfCapitalism.com that we wrote up here back on February 11. This week he has an article up at WashingtonPost.com on why Road to Serfdom has been selling so well:

the underlying reason for the sustained interest in Hayek's book is that it taps into a profound dissatisfaction in the public mind with the machinations of its government. Both Presidents Bush and Obama have presided over huge growth in the size of the federal government and in the size of the federal deficit, with little obvious effect on unemployment. Things seem out of control.

A friend and reader emailed to suggest a post on how the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal reviews treated Ken Gormley's new book on the Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky investigations of Bill Clinton, The Death of American Virtue. The reader wrote that it's as though they're reviewing two different books. To me the striking thing was how similar the two reviews were in their failure to deal with the roles that the two newspapers themselves played in aggressively pressing for special prosecutors and in investigating and airing the Clinton scandals. We got into that point a bit in an earlier post concerning the New York Times. To me the newspaper that looks best on the whole thing in retrospect is the Forward, which under Seth Lipsky's editorship hewed to the line of Justice Scalia's dissent in Morrison v. Olson, that the special prosecutor was unconstitutional.

ObamaCare is not exactly my cup of tea, but, as I have noted in the past (see here, here, and here), the Wall Street Journal editorialists seem willing to make just about any argument, no matter how unreasonable or outright inaccurate, to defeat it. The latest example comes in today's Journal editorial attempting to defend WellPoint for its 39% rate increases on California Anthem Blue Cross customers. (FutureOfCapitalism.com reported and weighed in on the controversy back on February 10.) Here's the first laugher: "Anthem last year hired an independent actuarial firm that found its rates sound and necessary." Hmm, if the firm was hired by Anthem, do you really think it was independent? How much was this firm paid for this job, and would it have been re-hired had it found the rate increases to be unsound and unnecessary? The Wall Street Journal editoralized about MIT economist Jonathan Gruber's self-interest in relation to his consulting contracts with the federal government; what about the financial interest of this "independent" actuarial firm? The real puzzler, though, is the Journal's claim today that, "Anthem's profit margins are in line with its two largest nonprofit competitors in the state; its net income on a per-member-per-month basis in 2008 was $12.62, compared to Blue Shield's $13.22 and Kaiser's $18.45." Since non-profits, by definition, don't have "profit margins," it's hard to know what the Journal is talking about. But Blue Shield of California's Web site says it had "operating income" of $307 million in 2008, and 3.368 million members. Do the math and that's net income per member per month of $7.60, not the $13.22 the Journal cites. Kaiser's Web site says it had 2008 net income of $794 million, and 8.6 million members. That's net income per member per month of $7.69, not the $18.45 cited by the Journal. The Journal doesn't say where its numbers come from. Let's hope it wasn't that "independent" actuarial firm hired by Anthem. I've emailed the 20th-most-influential conservative journalist in the country to ask him for a response and will update if I hear back from him.

A village with a population of 292 has hired a Washington lobbyist, Timothy Carney reports in the Washington Examiner, explaining that Bald Head Island in North Carolina "might be the smallest municipality to hire a federal lobbyist."

Arnold Beichman, a fellow at the Hoover Institution and a friend of freedom, has died at age 97. John Podhoretz has an appreciation over at Commentary. I'd just add that I'm grateful that Beichman was always generous in terms of picking up my writing and, whenever he did so, crediting it in his own work.

Robert Lenzner, an occasional commenter on this site and a smart, experienced guy, has a column in Forbes: "Stop sniping at Hank Paulson. The former Treasury Secretary saved the day by overcoming his predilection for free market capitalism ...His pragmatic boldness helped save the capitalist system from a possible total collapse." I actually think there's a strong case that Mr. Paulson's actions made things worse, not better. But that even Mr. Lenzner buys into the Paulson-Obama-Bernanke-Geithner-Buffett narrative of how these guys supposedly averted a global economic catastrophe is a sign that the Paulson-made-it-worse view is losing out to the Paulson-was-a-hero view, at least in one test case of a person in whom you might expect some sympathy to the Paulson-made-it-worse case.

The man who just may turn out to be the next governor of New York had lunch with me today in Midtown. No, not Andrew Cuomo, but the county executive of Suffolk County, New York, Steve Levy.

You probably have not heard much about this Long Island official elsewhere yet, but you probably will soon. He already has raised $4 million in campaign funds and aims to raise another $1 million this month in advance of a June 1 convention at which the Republican Party will choose its candidate.

Mr. Levy himself was elected in 1986 as a Suffolk County legislator as a Democrat, in 2001 to the state Assembly as a Democrat, and in 2004 as the Suffolk County executive as a Democrat. But he describes his approach as "not really being Democrat or Republican but just common sense."

That may be what New York state, facing major budget trouble, needs – what Mr. Levy, a lean and mustachioed 50 year old, describes over a pastrami sandwich and matzo ball soup as "fiscal conservatism with a proven record."

Amity Shlaes has a column up at Bloomberg News on how government jobs are crushing the entrepreneurial spirit:

Jobs with Uncle Sam aren't just more numerous than they used to be. They're better. Wages and benefits for federal civilian workers were more than double the average total compensation in the private sector: $119,982 versus $59,909. In the treacherous period between December 2007 and mid-2009, the number of federal employees earning more than $100,000 doubled, rising to 66,500 or so. Much of this was due to locked-in raises for workers who were rising through the ranks.

Then there's the allure of the stability of a federal job. About one in five jobs at the federal level ends in firing or resignation. By contrast that rate is one in two in the private sector, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey....The new relative appeal of a government job sends a message that private-sector work, especially self-employment or a job at a start-up, may not be worthwhile.

"Aetna is a well-managed company and I am confident that your shareholders are going to do well," President Obama said to Aetna CEO Ronald Williams at the White House before a nationwide television audience back in June. The Seton Hall University Law School Health Reform Watch blog reports that Mr. Williams's 2008 total compensation was $24,300,112. Not bad for a year in which Aetna's share price plummetted to $28.46 from $56.47, losing about half of its value. The Seton Hall blog says that by comparison, WellPoint CEO Angela Braly is underpaid. She earned $9,844,212 in 2008. To Mr. Obama, the bankers are fat cat suicide bombers earning obscene bonuses (or they were, at least until he changed his tune). But the health insurance companies, whose executives earn as much or more than the bankers, are "well managed." Or at least Aetna is. Mr. Obama wasn't criticizing the insurance companies, because they pretty much backed his plan to force Americans to become their customers and use tax dollars to subsidize their premiums. We're generally of the view that free markets should set compensation. But there aren't too many other businesses around where you can earn a free-market salary while using the force of government to corral customers and the taxing power of government to subsidize your premiums. And Mr. Obama says a health care overhaul failed because he didn't do a good enough job of explaining it?

Who is lobbying for Goldman Sachs and General Electric? Former aides to Rep. Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, Timothy Carney writes in the Washington Examiner.

Michael Wolff says the real estate executive Mortimer Zuckerman, proprietor of the Daily News, is considering a run for U.S. Senate in New York. That'll be some debate between him and David Malpass.

One of the Republican presidential candidates in 2012 is going to be running against bailouts and Goldman Sachs, to judge by the comments of the governor of Minnesota, Tim Pawlenty, in an interview with Esquire magazine. Mr. Pawlenty: "I did not support the car-company bailout, either. They should have been allowed to go bankrupt — in fact, they [entered] bankruptcy, most of 'em. That's the way that they're going to get most effectively restructured. And I think the same could be said for many of the financial institutions. The idea that we're gonna bail out every major bank in the country with the exception of Lehman Brothers is ridiculous. Why let Lehman fail and not all the others? These markets have to correct. And the answer can't be for every problem that emerges as a result of reckless behavior, the government's gonna come in and bail everybody out. I was talkin' to people this morning who run small businesses. Where's their bailout?"

There's been no shortage of explanations offered here for the pressure on Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain -- "PIGS", from the lack of Jews in those countries to the arrogance of the elites to a bear raid. A reader e-mails to suggest one explanation I haven't yet seen much attention paid to; the hangover from the 2004 Olympics in Athens. It's an explanation you'd think we might be hearing more about given that there are Olympic Games underway right now in Vancouver. The economic trouble facing Greece is something worth considering for anyone who thinks that infrastructure investment is the answer to America's economic problems. It's actually almost painful now to go back and read some of the journalism that was committed over these issues. Here's the Christian Science Monitor in a July 2008 dispatch from Athens. "Citizens question the event's $15 billion price tag – most of it paid for by the state," the Monitor reported, dwelling on empty sports arenas. But it concluded with positive spin from Kostas Kartalis, former head of Hellenic Olympic Properties, the state-run company responsible for the Olympic venues:

The Tea Party movement is a bunch of racist gun nuts, the New York Times more or less concludes in a long article published today:

Rachel Dolezal, curator of the Human Rights Education Institute in Coeur d'Alene, has also watched the Tea Party movement with trepidation. Though raised in a conservative family, Ms. Dolezal, who is multiracial, said she could not imagine showing her face at a Tea Party event. To her, what stands out are the all-white crowds, the crude depictions of Mr. Obama as an African witch doctor and the signs labeling him a terrorist. "It would make me nervous to be there unless I went with a big group," she said.

As for the Tea Party types themselves, they are keeping busy, according to the Times: