Paul Krugman has a column in this morning's New York Times comparing America and Europe and arguing that Europe is doing pretty well, notwithstanding its high taxes and extensive welfare programs. Here's one key section: "It's true that the U.S. economy has grown faster than that of Europe for the past generation. Since 1980 — when our politics took a sharp turn to the right, while Europe's didn't — America's real G.D.P. has grown, on average, 3 percent per year. Meanwhile, the E.U. 15 — the bloc of 15 countries that were members of the European Union before it was enlarged to include a number of former Communist nations — has grown only 2.2 percent a year. America rules! Or maybe not. All this really says is that we've had faster population growth. Since 1980, per capita real G.D.P. — which is what matters for living standards — has risen at about the same rate in America and in the E.U. 15: 1.95 percent a year here; 1.83 percent there."

The New York Times has a front-page news article, and the Wall Street Journal has a section-front article, about an initiative to be announced today by New York City to crack down on salt. It's a reminder that whether news is "new" often depends on the particular reader, or editor; the New York Sun had a front-page article reporting this back on September 29, 2008, in an article that appeared under the headline, "Salt Is Next on City's Hit List." It's also a reminder that, as the government assumes a larger share of health care costs, it is increasingly able to use that as a justification to intrude into personal decisions or private enterprises, whether it's a matter of smoking policy, trans-fats, or salt.

A unit of Citigroup called Global Transaction Services has prospered since the U.S. government has taken an ownership stake in the bank, The Wall Street Journal reports: "after the U.S. last February took a 34% stake in Citigroup (since reduced to 27%), various arms of the government repeatedly gave more business to the Citigroup unit. Since mid-2008, the amount of revenue GTS gets from the U.S. government has more than doubled, executives say....When bidding for new federal contracts, some GTS executives have cited the government's stake in Citigroup, said a person familiar with the matter. Their pitch to the government: 'You own us. Isn't it in your best interest for us to succeed?'" How are Citigroup's competitors supposed to answer that one?

The Wall Street Journal's Raymond Sokolov reports on running what he calls a "Danny Meyer Marathon," eating his way through all 10 of the Union Square Hospitality Group's New York restaurants. He writes that he did so "within reason—I opted to visit only one of the two Manhattan Shake Shacks, given their identical menus." As the author of the authoritative article on the Shake Shack, and as a customer of both the Madison Square Park and Upper West Side outlets, I can say for certain that the menus, while similar, are not identical. To cite just one subtle but nevertheless significant difference to those who care about such things, the Madison Square Park Shake Shack offers Valrhona chocolate chunks, while the Upper West Side Shake Shack offers Valrhona "chocolate crunchies." The "crunchies," which are good, and crunchy, are nonetheless, to the taste of this particular chocolate lover, inferior to the chunks. I am tempted to make this into some broader point about the future of capitalism or how you can't competely trust the reporting even when it comes from a veteran of the largest and most trusted newspaper in America. But that would probably be a stretch. Consider this just a bonus bit of reader service; if you like chocolate and have a choice between the Madison Square Park and the Upper West Side Shake Shacks, go to Madison Square. Another service provided by FutureOfCapitalism.com; we sample the chocolate toppings on frozen custard that the Wall Street Journal critic thinks it's unreasonable to go through the trouble to test for his readers.

"I'm running because this is the fight of my generation. The prior one fought the Cold War, before that it was World War II. But our fight is becoming one for the principles of free markets and against creeping socialism," a 38-year-old Republican running against Rep. David Obey of Wisconsin tells the Wall Street Journal's Kimberley Strassel.

On Tuesday, FutureOfCapitalism.com noted that Citigroup director John Deutch had been appointed to a Defense Department advisory panel. Yesterday, Citigroup announced he's stepping down from the board.

The Wall Street Journal has a story that says a lot: "The office market in Washington, D.C., is poised to topple New York as the nation's most expensive, reflecting the declining fortunes of the nation's financial center and the government expansion under way in the U.S. capital." According to the article, "Of the 16 largest leasing transactions in Washington last year, 10 were by government agencies." Government expansion, indeed.

South Carolina and Louisiana already have "Second Amendment sales tax holidays," and an Oklahoma state senator wants to add his state to the list. The Tax Foundation argues that it is "a shining example of how not to approach tax policy," writing, "a sales tax holiday to encourage citizens to exercise their Second Amendment rights is hard to justify. Would anyone support a plan by the state treasurer to send out checks to individuals who elect to stand on street corners and exercise their right to free speech? What about a check for those who exercise their freedom of religion?"

Former Bush administration economics aide Keith Hennessey has this to say about how the politics of health care may shape up if a bill is passed: "the stimulus was a Presidential victory last February that has since been redefined to be a policy question mark and a political minus for its supporters. These health bills start from a much weaker policy and political starting point, and if Republicans and their outside allies continue to pound away even after a signing ceremony, there will be long-term policy and political effects that are now impossible to predict. Nervous Congressional Democrats should worry that their opponents will highlight this issue in November, and implementation foul-up stories are ready-made for ongoing press coverage. This is reinforced by policies which front-load the tax increase pain and don't deliver subsidies for several years."

Bloomberg News has gotten hold of some emails between lawyers for the New York Fed and for AIG that depict the New York Federal Reserve, then headed by Timothy Geithner, who is now President Obama's Treasury Secretary, as trying to keep secret some of AIG's payments to counterparties, including Goldman Sachs. One lawyer for AIG wrote to a lawyer for the Fed that one filing ""reflects your client's desire that there be no mention of the synthetics in connection with this transaction...They will not be mentioned at all." The Bloomberg article quotes a Republican congressman who obtained the emails, Darrell Issa, as saying, "It appears that the New York Fed deliberately pressured AIG to restrict and delay the disclosure of important information." The whole story shows what a swamp the government takeover of AIG was; in order to fulfill its disclosre obligations to one branch of the government, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company needed to beg to permission of another branch of the government, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It all seems to have provided lots of work for lawyers, but it's hard to see how it provided much value to shareholders or taxpayers.

In our review of Thomas Sowell's new book Intellectuals and Society, and in a subsequent comment on a New York Times editorial, we've been discussing the appropriateness of the comparison between government spending on education and on prisons. Now Governor Schwarzenegger of California seems to buy in to the idea that they need to stay in some sort of balance; the New York Times reports that the governor will "push for a constitutional amendment prohibiting the percentage of the state budget earmarked for prisons from exceeding what is set aside for its public university system." While Mr. Schwarzenegger seems to want to privatize some of the prisons, he also seems to be missing an essential point, which is that criminal justice is a core responsibility of the state, while higher education is a responsibility that can be undertaken by private institutions, albeit with some government subsidies. To give a concrete example: In-state tuition at U.C. Berkeley Law School is $35,907, while at Stanford it is $42,420. Why should the Stanford students and professors be taxed by the state of California to help a competing institution provide tuition at below-market rates? And why should a California farm worker or taxi driver or prison guard be taxed to help pay for the education of some U.C. Berkeley law student who is going to end up making $180,000 or thereabouts as a first-year law firm associate? It's a reverse Robin-Hood.

There's more bad news about the health care provided by the government through the Veterans Administration, which Nobel laureate New York Times columnist Paul Krugman claims "manages to combine quality care with low costs." The latest is a report (pdf) from the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress, following up on a finding that at a VA Medical Center in Marion, Ill., seven out of 180 patients between October 2006 and December of 2006 died during or after surgery. "This mortality rate was more than four times greater than expected when considering the patients' physical conditions prior to surgery," the report says, in part because "physicians had privileges to perform procedures without evidence of competence to perform the procedures." Now the GAO has checked records at six other VA Medical Centers and found "29 of the 180 credentialing and privileging files reviewed lacked proper verification of state medical licensure. In addition, the VAMCs did not identify instances when physicians appeared to have omitted required information on their applications. For example, GAO identified 21 files where required malpractice information was not disclosed by physicians and was not detected by VAMCs."

The world's largest company by market capitalization is the Chinese energy company PetroChina. The Financial Times's Lex column reports that PetroChina's Chinese-government-owned parent company, CNPC, just spent about $600 million to buy back about half a billion PetroChina shares, raising its ownership stake to 86.54% from 86.29%. "The best explanation is a creeping re-nationalisation of the state's most prized strategic assets," the FT says. There's both a Goldman Sachs angle and a Warren Buffett angle on PetroChina. At least here in America, the government says it wants to eventually exit its positions in companies such as General Motors and Citigroup. No such luck in China.

In the middle of an otherwise eminently sensible and insightful Thomas Friedman column in today's New York Times about how to stop suicide bombers comes this, out of the blue, in a quote from "Dov Seidman, the C.E.O. of LRN, which helps companies build ethical cultures": "When we call a banker 'a fat cat' for taking too big a bonus, we're actually being inspirational leaders because we are telling them, 'You are behaving beneath how a responsible human being should behave.' We need to inspire the village to shame those who betray our common values." Mr. Seidman and through him Mr. Friedman are now joining President Obama in likening Wall Street banker bonus recipients to suicide bombers. That seems an awfully big leap to make, especially without defining what "too big" a bonus is. There are plenty of bankers on Wall Street whose bonus income is less than Mr. Friedman makes on his bestselling books and his $75,000 speaking fees, or who don't belong to the two country clubs Mr. Friedman belongs to, or have the $9.3 million, 11,400 square-foot house that Mr. Friedman does. Is Mr. Friedman's house "too big"? Are the bankers's bonuses "too big"? Maybe, but this column contains no rational argument that they are, just a cheap shot sideswipe.

A column in today's New York Times criticizes the H & M clothing store for using razor blades to slash unsold garments before throwing them away. There's no mention at all of the fact that newsstand dealers of the New York Times do the same thing, using razor blades to destroy unsold copies of the New York Times (or at least remove the "New York Times" label from the top of the front page) before throwing the papers away or recycling them. The reason they do that is the same reason than H & M does it; they don't want a secondary market to emerge that they do not control in discounted, out-of-date, but still somewhat valuable goods. Don't expect a Times column anytime soon about how those one-day-old newspapers should be donated to the poor, to libraries, or to schools rather than being cut up. The Times's double standard when it comes to "greedy corporate interests" is on display yet again.