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The New York state attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, won't accept campaign contributions from people with matters before his office. Conveniently enough, however, he will, and does, accept such contributions from their lawyers, Bloomberg News reports. You've heard of the "appearance of impropriety"; in New York State government, the thing to be concerned about sometimes is the appearance of propriety.

The Wall Street Journal has written some rousing editorials against the abuse of eminent domain, but today's paper carries an article that emerged from the paper's "CEO Summit" and that seems to have been produced somehow in collaboration with MIT. It lists, as among the CEOs top five recommendations for energy policy: "FEDERAL PLAN FOR ELECTRIC GRID. Congress should enact federal authority to deploy a more efficient electric grid that enables the diversification of U.S. energy supplies, gives the federal government more authority to site transmission lines through eminent domain and gives the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission the power to allocate costs." Emphasis ours. Over at the Wall Street Journal, they sound like the Socialists of Sanford Bernstein. We're not saying that eminent domain should never be used. It's in the Fifth Amendment for a reason. But there's also a reason that there's a reference to private property being taken "for public use." Whether a transmission line for a privately owned utility qualifies as a "public use" is an interesting question that has the potential to cut across some of the usual partisan lines. Those noted libertarians Henry Waxman, Charles Schumer, and Hillary Clinton are skeptical, while Vice President Cheney tends to support the idea.

The Am Law Litigation Daily has an interview with the lawyer who won a $300 million verdict against Philip Morris USA on behalf of an emphysema victim. The story indicates that the pivotal factor in the size of the verdict was less how much the smoker had suffered and more how much money Philip Morris makes:

The company, he said, claimed that it was worth only $1.7 billion. But he presented witnesses who said that in just the first three quarters of 2009, Philip Morris paid $3.1 billion in dividends to Altria, its parent company. "We broke it down and it was about $10 million a day," he said. "The jury was impressed by the numbers."

The New York Times has a news article running under the headline "New Consensus Views Stimulus as Worthy Step" that is ridiculous even by New York Times standards. Says the Times, "with roughly a quarter of the stimulus money out the door after nine months, the accumulation of hard data and real-life experience has allowed more dispassionate analysts to reach a consensus that the stimulus package, messy as it is, is working.The legislation, a variety of economists say, is helping an economy in free fall a year ago to grow again and shed fewer jobs than it otherwise would." The article relies heavily on analysis by Moody's, the same organization that was stamping AAA ratings on all those mortgage backed securities that didn't turn out so well. Not even honest partisan Democrats buy this argument; even White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers said, "It is too early to know how successful our policies have been. It is not even clear how we will know ultimately whether they have succeeded, because of the difficulty of constructing a counterfactual and knowing what would have happened without intervention," and the Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Max Baucus, said, "You created a situation where you cannot be wrong. ...If the economy loses 2 million jobs over the next few years, you can say yes, but it would've lost 5.5 million jobs. If we create a million jobs, you can say, well, it would have lost 2.5 million jobs...You've given yourself complete leverage where you cannot be wrong, because you can take any scenario and make yourself look correct."

Amity Shlaes gave the Manhattan Institute's Hayek Lecture on Thursday night, and she didn't pull any punches. I've already mentioned her scathing assessment of the Obama administration's treatment of the Chrysler bondholders, but the rest of the talk is worth recounting, too. Miss Shlaes was introduced by the publisher, author, and former presidential candidate Steve Forbes, who portrayed President Obama as something other than the wave of the future. "The Obama administration is the last gasp of the New Deal," Mr. Forbes said. "He's a dinosaur. He's a relic. His mindset is 1935." Miss Shlaes, too, said she saw parallels between the current period and the Great Depression era that she wrote about in her book The Forgotten Man. She spoke of the "sense that money is waiting, not playing," and of the "arrogance" of the Roosevelt administration, "talking down to citizens" and "undermining property rights."

"A Florida jury on Thursday ordered cigarette maker Philip Morris USA to pay $300 million in damages to a 61-year-old ex-smoker named Cindy Naugle who is wheelchair-bound by emphysema," Reuters reports. Damages will probably be reduced on appeal, and we are non-smokers here at FutureOfCapitalism.com, but still...Can "sugary drinks" be far behind?

The blogger Felix Salmon, at Reuters, was kind enough to link my post from this morning about the Bair-Miller-Moore Haircut and to disagree with it. I will try to answer Mr. Salmon point-by-point and also offer a more general, conceptual response.

David Brooks has a column defending Timothy Geithner's handling of the financial crisis: "the evidence of the past eight months suggests that Geithner was mostly right and his critics were mostly wrong. The financial sector is in much better shape than it was then. TARP money is being repaid, and the debate now is what to do with the billions that were never needed. It now seems clear that nationalization would have been an unnecessary mistake — potentially expensive and dangerously disruptive. The course of events has vindicated the administration's handling of its first big challenge." What will Mr. Geithner do next? Mr. Brooks says he will have to deal with "the deficits," "the rising populism in Congress" and "intense public cynicism about government." Hmm. I wonder where all those deficits, populism, and cynicism came from. Could they just possibly have anything to do with those policies of Mr. Geithner that Mr. Brooks would have us believe have been so wonderfully vindicated over the past eight months?

When the FDIC chairman, Sheila Bair, gave a speech in Istanbul on October 5 floating a proposal to limit the claims of secured creditors of failed banks, we commented that the change would "make it harder and more expensive for banks to raise capital." When we checked if her proposed 20% haircut would apply just to newly issued debt or retroactively to existing secured creditors, her spokesman replied, "The chairman simply raised the issue as a possible approach. No details were provided." Well, the details are in, and the proposal has gone from trial balloon stage to actual legislation, in the form of an amendment passed this week to the House financial services "reform" bill.

The Fox Business correspondent John Stossel writes a column about what he calls "the arrogance of the ruling class," predicting that a tax revolt won't happen until "more people see the ruling elite for what it is: a gang of arrogant bullies that has the audacity to believe that they know how to direct our lives better than we do." For an example of that elite arrogance, check out the Socialists of Sanford Bernstein.

George Soros is buying Google ads to steer traffic to his recent lectures, including the transcript of his speech on "Capitalism Versus Open Society." He says, "There is a deep-seated conflict between capitalism and open society, market values and social values. The conflict has been successfully covered up by the market fundamentalist ideology which gained the upper hand in the 1980's during Ronald Reagan's presidency." He bemoans what he calls "a decline in public morality fostered by the rise of market fundamentalism." More: "Economic theory claims that in conditions of general equilibrium, the invisible hand assures the optimum allocation of resources. This means that people pursuing their self-interest are indirectly also serving the public interest. It gives self-interest and the profit motive a moral imprimatur which allows them to replace virtues like honesty, integrity, and concern for others. The argument is invalid on several counts." More: "I want to make myself quite clear: I condemn market fundamentalism as a false and dangerous doctrine but I am in favor of keeping government intervention and regulations to a minimum for other better reasons." More: "The spread of market values has brought immense economic benefits." Mr. Soros isn't always the clearest writer or thinker and even if you can follow his argument you may not agree with it, but he has a lot of money and is willing to spend it to advance his ideas, so for that reason alone he is worth paying some attention to. Not to mention the fact that "free market fundamentalists" might as well try to understand the arguments of their critics.

"We believe the following changes are imperative," a new report says, "In our view, the US must move aggressively to create a centralized, or federal, authority for the planning, siting and interconnection of new wind farms." The report says that such a change "would bring the US closer to the more centralized regulatory model in the European countries with the largest wind regimes." The report concludes, "In our view, to develop a commercial-scale, efficient wind regime, the US will need to create a centralized federal planning authority." For skeptics who may not yet be fully convinced, the report includes a sidebar that begins, "we believe that the US can draw some useful insights from the successful development of wind power in Europe." What are those insights? You guessed it, "centralized planning." The report explains: "Spain's state-owned Red Electrica de Espana (REE) owns most of the transmission network and is responsible for system operation and future development. Denmark's grid is also centrally owned and planned by Energinet.dk, which is owned by the Danish government as represented by the Danish Ministry of Climate and Energy. These centralized regulatory frameworks have helped expedite the decision making, planning, and execution of system expansions and upgrades." Sound like a document from Greenpeace or the Socialist International? No, it's a research report from the money management and research firm AllianceBernstein. Imagine how the folks at Bernstein would react if it were investment research and money management capacity that was going to be government-owned and controlled rather than the energy industry. Bernstein used to be owned by the American capitalist it is named for but now it is owned by a French insurance company. Sometimes, it shows.

Alex Epstein offers some free-market thoughts on health care: "our health--care discussion should focus, not on how government controls can solve our problems, but on how government controls have caused our problems."

The Associated Press has a detailed report on the case of an American citizen working in China who apparently ran afoul of one of China's state-run oil companies. He was arrested by Chinese government authorities and has been imprisoned for two years; the AP says, "At some point, his jailers beat him, struck him on the head with an ashtray as well as applying the lit cigarettes to his arm."