The topic of the day seems to be health care, with both ends of the ideological spectrum hyperventilating over the significance of the 60-40 Senate vote at 1 this morning, with Washington blanketed in snow, to go ahead with debate on Senator Reid's legislation. A final vote is reportedly scheduled for 7 p.m. on Christmas Eve. Leave aside what it says about the Senate that they work such odd hours. And leave aside, for now, all the special political deals for certain states and even individual hospitals that were cut as a way of purchasing the support of individual senators for the legislation – the New York Times has an excellent account of some of these deals in today's paper.

Michael Moore is threatening to boycott the state of Connecticut in retaliation for Senator Lieberman's actions on the health care overhaul, the Hill reports.

Bloomberg News has a lengthy and detailed examination of Harvard University's losing bets on interest rates. Among the priceless quotes are from minutes of Harvard President Lawrence Summers's comments at a 2004 meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Science, in which he told the faculty he hoped they wouldn't be "preoccupied with the constraints imposed by resources, for Harvard was fortunate to have many deeply loyal friends." He told the professors that "Harvard would be able to generate adequate resources," and that "The only real limitation faced by the Faculty was the limit of its imagination." And, even better, a lawyer for Harvard at the Boston firm of Ropes & Gray asked Massachusetts Health & Educational Facilities Authority officials "whether the agency could omit from a public hearing that some of the bonds would finance swap termination payments." "There is some sensitivity at Harvard about not specifically flagging the swap interest unwind payments," the lawyer wrote on Nov. 12 to Deborah Boyce, an analyst at the authority, according to the Bloomberg account. "They still would like the ability to finance them, but would prefer to delete those references if they can do so." And, even better, "Harvard and JPMorgan celebrated the bond issue by hosting a cocktails-and-dinner party at the French restaurant Mistral, in Boston's South End neighborhood, where appetizers start at $15 and entrees cost about $40, according to e-mails obtained from the state finance agency. JPMorgan invoiced the agency $388.78 for three employees who attended: Caswell, Marietta Joseph and Danielle Manning." This was a dinner to celebrate the fact that Harvard, backed by the state of Massachusetts, had sold $2.5 billion in bonds "using $497.6 million of the proceeds to pay investment banks to extract itself from $1.1 billion of interest-rate swaps." At least $34.5 million went to JPMorgan. The Bloomberg article doesn't disclose whether JPMorgan invoiced Harvard for the cost of entertaining the Harvard employees at the dinner at Mistral, or if it just considered it part of the expense associated with getting the $34.5 million. Not to put too fine a point on it -- Harvard does some wonderful things, including employing Greg Mankiw, Ed Glaeser, and Ruth Wisse -- but after reading this article even a loyal alumnus would have to think really hard before giving the school another dime.

On December 3, I wrote, in a post headlined "Saab's Reluctant Seller": "Somehow I get the sense that General Motors is in the same position with Saab as Condé Nast was in with Gourmet. The company doesn't actually want to find a buyer that will take over and turn around the money-losing property, because if such a buyer and turned-around company do emerge, they will just be a competitor for General Motors and its brands, the same way that a sold and turned around Gourmet would have been a competitor for Condé Nast's Bon Appetit." Now General Motors has issued a press release headlined "Saab Sale Cannot Be Concluded/Brand To Be Wound Down."

Vanguard mutual funds founder Jack Bogle, fresh from advocating for a transaction tax, is now calling for an estate tax, or death tax, the Wall Street Journal reports, adding that William Gates Sr. is also campaigning for the estate tax, which is scheduled to expire temporarily in 2010. It's something that Mr. Gates Sr. manages to campaign for the estate tax while serving as co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the vehicle by which William Gates Sr.'s son, the founder of Microsoft, is giving away most of his money so that it doesn't end up getting eaten up by the estate tax and falling into the hands of politicians who may spend it less wisely than he will. The Journal quotes Mr. Gates Sr. as saying "it's clear that those who become wealthy did not do it alone. The people owe something back to society that enables them to create that wealth." This idea that rich people exist at the sufferance of the rest of society is a long-held one, but it's problematic. It's not like America did these people a big favor by allowing them to enjoy their property rights; those rights pre-existed America, and if America had done anything to infringe on them, it would be violating those rights. They are natural, human rights, inalienable rights, as the Founders realized. That doesn't mean that rich people and all Americans shouldn't be patriotic, or that those who feel particularly grateful or guilty shouldn't voluntarily give money to charity or write an extra bonus check to the U.S. Treasury or to some charity that supports the troops or American history. But the idea of forcing rich people to express their gratitude through estate taxes in addition to the income taxes, payroll taxes, sales taxes, and many other taxes that they are already subject to -- many of them on a progressive scale, or to pay for benefits that phase out at certain income levels -- goes beyond gratitude or noblesse oblige. It involves using the taxing power of the government to force people to pay money to express gratitude, whether or not they feel it, and whether or not they feel that the gratitude might be better expressed by choosing to give the money to their children to continue a family business or start a new one or to invest in new ideas that will also in their own way help build America. Since there are plenty of people, too, who were born in America and didn't make fortunes, the idea that the fortunes are largely owed to America rather than the people who created them has its flaws.

Stanford University's Alvin Rabushka replies to the demands for a tax on banker bonuses with a suggestion of his own -- "In keeping with President Obama's pledge not to raise taxes on single persons earning less than $200,00 and married couples less than $250,000 a year, I suggest a 50 percent bonus tax on all professors whose earnings exceed those levels. Moreover, because the professors are so keen on progressivity, I further propose an additional 5 percent bonus tax on each incremental $50,000, up to a maximum bonus tax of 75 percent on earnings exceeding $450,000 and $500,000 for single and married taxpayers respectively. Moreover, to avoid any loopholes, professors should also pay these bonus taxes on dividends and capital income, including hitherto tax-exempt bonds." This would have hit both Mr. Obama, who earned book income while on the University of Chicago Law faculty, and White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers, who earned $5.2 million a year for his one-day-a-week job at the D.E. Shaw hedge fund while serving as a Harvard professor.

A good portion of my writing and thinking this week has been devoted to the online discussion I've been having with Nicole Gelinas, author of After the Fall, at the Manhattan Institute's Web site. Today's installment focuses on deposit insurance, and I ask, "Why wouldn't private insurance work for bank depositors in the same way that it does for health care, life insurance, car insurance, or homeowners insurance?"

Senator Schumer discloses how he really feels about a working woman.

In my attempt to referee the conflict between Jim Manzi of the Manhattan Institute and National Affairs and Atul Gawande of Harvard Medical School and the New Yorker over what percentage of the American workforce worked on farms in 1900, one thing I have found out so far is that neither one of them went back to the actual census data. Mr. Manzi, who wrote that in 1900 "about one-third" of the labor force was in agriculture, tells me that he relied on a 2007 report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. Dr. Gawande, who wrote that in 1900 farming accounted for "almost half the American workforce," sourced that claim, according to an email from his research assistant to me, to a 2005 paper from the US Department of Agriculture. I went back to the actual U.S. Census of 1900, and the special report "Occupations at the Twelfth Census," which indicates that in 1900, the percent of the workforce devoted to agricultural pursuits in 1900 was 35.6. The information is table XXI on page lxxxvi (page 92 of the 1062-page PDF.) Is 35.6% "about one-third," as Mr. Manzi would have it? Or is it "almost half," as Dr. Gawande would have it? Seems like a fine question for those vaunted fact-checkers at the New Yorker, or for readers here to decide for themselves and voice their opinions in the comments section. As I noted in the earlier post on this topic, this is more than just an obscure dispute over historical statistics, because the White House is using the New Yorker article to make the case that passing a health care overhaul will lead to cost reductions. If the big reductions in the farm workforce took place before the implementation of the government farm-productivity-increasing efforts touted by Dr. Gawande, it undercuts that argument for passing the health care bill.

An article by the Harvard Medical School surgeon Atul Gawande in the December 14 New Yorker about how the U.S. Department of Agriculture's extension service may be a model for health care cost reduction has gotten a lot of attention, including from the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, Peter Orszag, who praised it as "trenchant" and declared, "All together, I agree with Gawande." A lot of the Gawande article is about not health care but farming. Here is how Dr. Gawande tells the story, in a nutshell: In 1900, "farming was hugely labor-intensive, tying up almost half the American workforce." He writes, "You might think that the invisible hand of market competition would have solved these problems, that the prospect of higher income from improved practices would have encouraged change. But laissez-faire had not worked." Instead, in 1914, "Congress passed the Smith-Lever Act, establishing the U.S.D.A. Cooperative Extension Service. By 1920, there were seven thousand federal extension agents, working in almost every county in the nation, and by 1930 they had set up more than seven hundred and fifty thousand demonstration farms." This government intervention was a big success, in Dr. Gawande's telling: "By 1930, food absorbed just ..twenty per cent of the workforce."

In a column in today's Wall Street Journal headlined "The Backdating Molehill Revisited," Holman Jenkins writes about the options backdating scandal, "We can't close without mentioning the exemplary diligence and enterprise with which, way back when, certain reporters and editors uncovered the backdating phenomenon, and then the intellectual sluggishness with which they analyzed it. They found an interesting story (one that fit well under the current interest in behavioral economics) and then got it fundamentally wrong by insisting on shoving it into a procrustean off-the-shelf narrative of executive 'greed.'" "Intellectual sluggishness"! "Fundamendally wrong"! Who are these reporters and editors, Mr. Jenkins? Might they be the columnist's own colleagues at the Wall Street Journal, who won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for what the citation for "a distinguished example of meritorious public service by a newspaper" called a "creative and comprehensive probe into backdated stock options for business executives that triggered investigations, the ouster of top officials and widespread change in corporate America"? The Jenkins column leaves them unnamed. We're not taking sides here in the debate between Mr. Jenkins and his colleagues, just pointing it out as newsworthy.

Wall Street Journal columnist James Stewart adds his name to those calling for governments to get together and set pay policies: "a coordinated global initiative is needed to curb excesses and deter the reckless risk-taking that got us here." Instead of allowing competition and experimentation, this "coordinated global initiative" would impose the same rules everywhere. When I noted that Senator Schumer was importing British-style regulation of the volume of television commercials, a reader commenter said it was "cute fear-mongering" about "importing EU law." But do we really want Brussels bureaucrats setting pay on Wall Street? That's more or less what a "coordinated global initiative" would mean.

The Winter issue of National Affairs is up online, with a provocative essay by Eric Cohen on Irving Kristol's view of capitalism and its limits. I say "provocative," for how else to describe Mr. Cohen's assertion, "Almost certainly, we will need to cut taxes on families and raise taxes on men and women who choose not to have children"? Tax policy is already fairly family friendly, what with tax benefits for child care, dependents, and tax-favored college-savings accounts. Mr. Cohen:

Senator Schumer, who seems to think that every problem requires a new federal law to fix it, has introduced the "Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act," or CALM Act, of 2009, which would require the Federal Communications Commission to regulate the volume of television advertisements so that they are no louder than the program on which they are appear. Said the soft-spoken senator from New York: "The last thing television watchers want is an advertisement shouting at them every time a TV program takes a commercial break. This legislation will go a long way in protecting TV viewers from disruptive and unnecessarily loud commercials." It's a classic example of relying on the federal government rather than individual responsibility. It's infantilizing in a certain way; Mr. Schumer seems to think that individuals lack the power to turn down the volume, change the channel, or turn off the tube, and instead need government to intervene to protect them. A lot of the products advertised on television (Buicks, certain prescription drugs) seem to be targeted at old people, anyway, so one can understand why the advertisers may want to turn up the volume to reach a potentially hearing-impaired audience. This is another example of America importing regulations from Europe; this article reports that Britain in 2008 began requiring broadcasters to avoid commercials that are "excessively noisy or strident." You'd think this would be an issue where capitalism's self-correcting ability would come into play; companies that air commercials that are "excessively noisy or strident" may find consumers reacting by not purchasing the product that is being advertised. They may stop airing the commercial, or go out of business. Anyway, we look forward to the soft-spoken commercials Mr. Schumer will air in his re-election campaign.

The congressman who wants to end the Federal Reserve, Ron Paul, Republican of Texas, was in New York last night for a dinner with about a dozen journalists. Mr. Paul's proposal to audit the Federal Reserve was included in the financial regulatory overhaul passed by the House last week, and someone at the dinner asked Dr. Paul what he expected the audit would show. The congressman said he'd look for disclosures about the Fed's communications or deals with foreign central banks, and for its dealings with American banks through the discount window. "I don't think anything would be off limits," he said. Despite the House passage and the fact that more than 300 members of Congress have signed on to the audit plan, Dr. Paul was stopping short of declaring a victory. "I have to be as upbeat as I can, but I don't think there'll be a true audit of the Fed," he said.