The New Yorker has a lively interview with the University of Chicago's Eugene Fama: "I didn't renew my subscription to The Economist because they use the world bubble three times on every page. Any time prices went up and down—I guess that is what they call a bubble."

And: "The experiment we never ran is, suppose the government stepped aside and let these institutions fail. How long would it have taken to have unscrambled everything and figured everything out? My guess is that we are talking a week or two. But the problems that were generated by the government stepping in—those are going to be with us for the foreseeable future. Now, maybe it would have been horrendous if the government didn't step in, but we'll never know. I think we could have figured it out in a week or two."

The finance minister of Poland, Jacek Rostowski, has a piece in today's Financial Times arguing that monetary policy's smoothing out of small crises is what created a big crisis. "What drives the market is the balance between fear and greed. If economic policy eliminates fear, only greed remains, and there is no mechanism to limit 'irrational exuberance'. This was the fundamental cause of the crisis. Moral hazard and herd behaviour are natural consequences," he writes. "Weak regulation and supervision were not the fundamental problems, although they can and should be improved. Countries not in crisis – China, Poland and much of Latin America – were, above all, those with low leverage, not those with sophisticated financial supervision."

Yuval Levin's Bradley Lecture at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington Monday night, "Recovering the Case for Capitalism," has been generating some vigorous and skeptical discussion elsewhere in the blogosphere.

National Review Online's Jonah Goldberg has a post defending a rights-based view of capitalism against Mr. Levin's rejection of such a view: "I really like the utilitarian case for capitalism that Yuval offers, but I don't see how it's possible to put into practice without accepting a pretty broad individual right to commit capitalism, which depends on a robust conception of property rights. By property rights I mean the right to enjoy the fruits of your labor, among other things. Defining property and the limits of that right can be tricky and contentious. But dismissing that right out of hand is just plain dangerous. Worse, it's unjust."

Some highlights from this morning's hearing of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission: Goldman Sachs CEO Loyd Blankfein's written testimony, in which he said, "After the shocks of recent months and the associated economic pain, there is a natural and appropriate desire for wholesale reform. We should resist a response, however, that is solely designed around protecting us from the 100-year storm. Taking risk completely out of the system will be at the cost of economic growth. We know from economic history that innovation – and the new industries and new jobs that result from it -- require risk taking. Similarly, if we abandon, as opposed to regulate, market mechanisms created decades ago, such as derivatives, we may end up constraining access to capital and the efficient hedging and distribution of risk."

JPMorgan Chase chairman and CEO James Dimon: "If you do everything right in business, you are going to make mistakes."

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman manages to write a whole column about how bullish he is on Communist China without even a single mention of the question of political freedom, or of the raid on Gmail accounts of human rights activists. His deadline may have been before the Google news broke, but even so, it's weird.

An editorial in today's New York Times calls for taxes on bank profits and on banker bonuses. The editorialists would be more credible on the point if they didn't reflexively call for tax increases as the solution to just about every perceived problem. The two taxes the Times back today mark at least the 12th and 13th tax increases that the paper has proposed or backed in the past seven years; you can read about the other 11 here, if you have the stomach for it.

The Associated Press has an update on the movement for Vermont to secede from the United States, a development that was first reported by the New York Sun back in 2006. The secessionists the AP interviews seem to be critical of Washington from the left, complaining of "Obama's failure to close the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan." Still, as Washington amasses power, don't be surprised to see the states beginning to push back. It is a band of 13 state attorneys general who are preparing to challenge the Constitutionality of the health care overhaul. And an independent candidate for governor of Colorado, Rich Hand, who I stumbled across because he wrote a nice blog post about my Samuel Adams biography, is running in part on a pledge "to ask the citizens of Colorado to amend the Colorado constitution to limit the amount of federal taxation on our citizens and corporations to 15% maximum." If such a pledge were approved it would set the stage for a constitutional battle. Mr. Hand's "Tenth Amendment Center Pledge" is also worth a read for those interested in Constitutional government.

It's an under-appreciated fact that, in the episode in which the Republican candidate for Senate in Massachusetts, Scott Brown, is seen explaining "it's not the Kennedys' seat, and it's not the Democrats' seat, it's the people's seat," the person he is disputing is not so much the Democratic candidate, Martha Coakley, but the debate moderator, David Gergen, a Yale graduate with a Harvard law degree who served in the Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton administrations and who now is a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. It was Mr. Gergen who had used the "Teddy Kennedy's seat" formulation, and, to judge by the YouTube video, it wasn't exactly his finest hour, though, who knows, it might propel Mr. Brown to the Senate in part on the sheer strength of populist reaction against what comes off as the arrogance of the elites.

This site has been sounding skeptical notes for months now about the Chinese Communist government. Now Google, annoyed by what appear to be Chinese government attempts to gain unauthorized access to the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists, is threatening to pull out of Communist China entirely. "These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China," Google said. There's a lot that could be said about this, but here is one point you are unlikely to hear made elsewhere: The George W. Bush Institute and Freedom House have sure shown some fine foresight in scheduling, for May, a conference on "Cyber-Dissidents," focusing on "the use of online tools by dissidents promoting democratic change around the world."

David Cameron, the British "Conservative" Party leader who favors a top income tax rate of 50%, also wants immigration restrictions that would limit Great Britain's population over the next 20 years to 70 million. The Financial Times has an editorial with some reasons this is a bad idea. Here in America, the restrictionist Federation for American Immigration Reform is a bronze sponsor of next month's National Tea Party Convention. Here at FutureOfCapitalism.com, we think that freedom includes free movement of people across borders, rather than protectionist restrictions on labor.

William Lerach, the securities class-action lawyer who pleaded guilty to hiding payments to plaintiffs and who is now on probation, has applied to the court "to take a 44-day vacation to 18 cities in Europe this summer accompanied by as many as 18 family members and friends," Politico's Josh Gerstein reports. This is a bit much even for the Obama administration's Justice Department, which wants the court to turn down the request, in part because of Lerach's "lack of contrition," Mr. Gerstein reports.

A front-page news article in the Wall Street Journal is careful to use only the word "fee," and not the word "tax" to refer to the idea of taxing bank liabilities or profits. The Journal doesn't describe why this is a "fee" and not a "tax." Elsewhere in today's Journal, the paper doesn't shy away from using the word "tax" to describe a proposal to extend an increased Medicare tax, which is now levied only on payroll income, to include "dividends and other income from investments." Why not call it a Medicare "fee"? The Tax Foundation's tax policy blog has a quick description, in another context, of the difference between a tax and a fee. The Tax Foundation says:

If it were up to legislatures, few things would be called "taxes," and loose definitions help deprive taxpayer protection provisions of any meaning.

We've heard about Christian Science and health reform. Now, it turns out, the Amish will also benefit from a "religious conscience" objection to the health care overhaul, the Watertown (N.Y.) Daily Times reports. The newspaper says the Amish "generally rely upon a community ethic that disdains government assistance. Families rely upon one another, and communities pitch in to help neighbors pay health care expenses. ...the Amish objections relate more to insurance than to medical care itself. Congressional aides said the exemption is based on a carve-out the Amish have had from Social Security and Medicare taxes since the 1960s." The article quotes an aide to Senator Schumer calling the provision a "no-brainer," by which he means, you don't need a big brain like Mr. Two-Harvard-Degree Deerslayer Schumer to realize it is an excellent idea. If families relying on one another and communities pitching in to help neighbors works well enough to allow the Amish to opt out, why isn't it a no-brainer to allow the rest of Americans the choice to opt out, too?

Politicians are often quick to condemn speculators who reap big profits with little risk. Unless, that is, the politicians are the ones reaping the profits. We knew about Hillary Clinton's $100,000 profit trading commodities such as cattle futures; now the New York Daily News brings word that a Democratic Congressman from Queens, Gary Ackerman, made $100,000 of his own. Mr. Ackerman "put no money down when he obtained private stock in the company, Xenonics Inc., relying on $14,000 borrowed in 2002 from the company's top shareholder, a longtime friend. The sweetheart loan required no collateral and had no written payback date, a potential violation of House ethics rules. When the company went public, its stock soared. Ackerman says he repaid the loan at 6% interest and sold the stock for more than $100,000 in 2005 and 2006." Where does a non-politician go to get a deal like this?

A professor of economics at Harvard, Greg Mankiw, has his own doubts about Paul Krugman's Europe column.