Further on the question of whether it is appropriate for the S.E.C. to have departed from its standard practice and have issued a press release with a headline and first paragraph referring to "billionaire Raj Rajaratnam," the U.S. Attorneys' Manual offers guidelines that apply at the Department of Justice. The Securities and Exchange Commission is a different creature, of course, and has its own standards, but the Justice Department rules are a useful yardstick for comparison. Those Justice Department guidelines say, "Department personnel, subject to specific limitations imposed by law or court rule or order and consistent with the provisions of these guidelines, may make public the following information in any criminal case in which charges have been brought: The defendant's name, age, residence, employment, marital status, and similar background information; The substance of the charge, limited to that contained in the complaint, indictment, information, or other public documents." It's debatable whether "billionaire" qualifies as "similar background information." The "billionaire" characterization contained in the press release is not contained in the text of the actual SEC complaint, which is also a bit odd, because these types of press releases from law enforcement agencies usually stick pretty closely to the formal legal documents. I have calls in to the SEC seeking their justification for characterizing Mr. Rajaratnam as a billionaire and will update when and if I hear back. One thing I asked is how do they know he is a billionaire? It's certainly possible he is, but it's also possible that he isn't.

The S.E.C.'s press release on its insider trading case against Raj Rajaratnam is headlined "SEC Charges Billionaire Hedge Fund Manager Raj Rajaratnam with Insider Trading." The release begins, "The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged billionaire Raj Rajaratnam and his New York-based hedge fund advisory firm Galleon Management LP with engaging in a massive insider trading scheme that generated more than $25 million in illicit gains." It seems to me that Mr. Rajaratnam may be guilty or innocent, but, either way, whether he is a billionaire is a fact that the government need not to include in the press release announcing the charges against him. We are supposed to have a rule of law in this country that applies equally to those who are billionaires and those who are indigent. It's one thing for the press to engage in this sort of sensationalist shorthand -- Michael Bloomberg jokes that when he first ran for mayor, he thought his name had been changed to "billionaire Michael Bloomberg." But the prosecutors at the S.E.C. are government officials, officers of the court. They ought to bend over backward to avoid the appearance of singling out targets for special treatment because of their wealth.

James Capretta, Donald Marron, and Robert Reich (!) all argue against.

The props supervisor at Carnegie Hall, who oversees things such as music stands, made $530,044 in salary and benefits during the fiscal year that ended in June 2008, Bloomberg News reports. One more piece of evidence for the case that for young people these days trying to decide whether to go into for-profit or non-profit work, compensation in non-profit work isn't a deterrent.

"I'm amazed at how passive the population has remained in the face of this sustained outrage," Bob Herbert writes in his column in today's New York Times. The outrage he is referring to is that, as he puts it, "Even as tens of millions of working Americans are struggling to hang onto their jobs and keep a roof over their families' heads, the wise guys of Wall Street are licking their fat-cat chops over yet another round of obscene multibillion-dollar bonuses — this time thanks to the bailout billions that were sent their way by Uncle Sam, with very little in the way of strings attached." Meanwhile, last month, in his regular column, the president of the Hudson Institute, Herbert London, wrote, "It strikes me as remarkable that a government take-over of so many aspects of the private economy has elicited so modulated a response...Had this overreaching, this blatant attempt at government usurpation, occurred in another period Americans would have been out on the streets with pitchforks ready for combat. But most Americans scarcely know what is going on. They don't get angry because they don't know what to be angry about."

An article in the Wall Street Journal highlights a controversy over whether Penny Pritzker qualifies as an "independent" director of Hyatt, which has filed for an initial public offering. Reports the Journal:

Under rules of the New York Stock Exchange, where Hyatt seeks to be listed, a company must have a majority of directors deemed "independent"—-meaning there isn't a relationship with the company or its executives that could create a conflict of interest. Including Ms. Pritzker, eight of 12 Hyatt directors have been designated as independent.

The Big Board gives a company latitude in making that designation. The exchange's rules don't consider a first cousin relationship close enough, by itself, to disqualify a director.

Plus, the millions of dollars of business done with Ms. Pritzker's firms are a tiny percentage of Hyatt's 2008 revenue of nearly $3.9 billion and her personal wealth, which is estimated to be over $1.5 billion.

Readers wondering whether that $615,175 federal government grant to digitize parts of the Grateful Dead archive held by the University of California, Santa Cruz was a wise expenditure of taxpayer funds will have an opportunity to view some of the collection when it comes to the New-York Historical Society for an exhibition in March.

In addition to all the other problems the Wall Street Journal editorial page cites with the Obama administration's proposed $250-a-senior "granny grant," it's a reverse Robin-Hood. According to the Federal Reserve's 2007 Survey of Consumer Finances, families headed by a 65 to 75 year-old had the highest average net worth of all American families, with an average net worth of $1.01 million. For comparison, families headed by someone less than 35 had an average net worth of $106,000, and families headed by someone between the ages of 35 and 44 had an average net worth of $327,000. Taking money away from the younger Americans by taxing them and giving it away in $250 checks to older Americans is taking from the poorer and giving to the richer, a classic reversal of the Robin Hood plan of taking from the rich and giving to the poor. Reasonable people may differ over the extent to which government should redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor, or over whether government should do that at all. But often what happens is the opposite, or government redistributing wealth from everyone to some politically powerful interest group such as seniors, who tend to be more reliable voters than other demographic groups.

Goldman Sachs has refused for nearly a year to let a reporter for the New York Times who writes a regular feature on rooms in New York City come and have a look at its corporate boardroom, the Times reports today. Maybe the paper should hire a different investment bank.

New York Times columnist David Brooks says that Republicans in America should look for inspiration to Conservatives in Britain, who back a 50% top tax rate at the national level. This is what passes for the right-of-center regular voice on the New York Times op-ed page.

Harvard economics professor and Nobel laureate Eric Maskin:

The sort of economics that deserves attack is Alan Greenspan's idealized world, in which financial markets work perfectly well on their own and don't require government action. There are, of course, still economists – probably fewer than before – who believe in that world. But it is an extreme position...

Mr. Greenspan may have thought that at one point, but he spent most of his career as a government actor. So Mr. Greenspan is a bit of a straw man here. Maskin goes on:

There's a danger of overdoing the regulation. You don't want government micromanaging financial institutions. Government is not particularly good at that, and it's likely to stifle good investment that would otherwise occur. So we'll have to strike a balance, which government is not always good at doing.

Link via Mankiw.

It looks like we were on to something with the item on October 13 about the New York City Council banning flavored cigarettes. Sure enough, the next day, the Council voted 46 to 1 (Lewis Fidler was the dissident) to pass a law banning cigarettes with "tastes or aromas relating to any fruit, chocolate, vanilla, honey, candy, cocoa, dessert, alcoholic beverage, herb or spice." Menthol, mint, and wintergreen flavors are excluded from the ban, at least for now. Link via the American Council on Science and Health.

At 44th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan is a building with window displays aimed at promoting GE. The displays consist of the GE logo and a variety of words. The two words that struck me most prominently -- they were high up on the windows, near the logos, and in large type -- were "government" and "stimulus." There's nothing wrong, of course, with a business being a government contractor or seeking to capture some stimulus spending. But it's a small signal of the times we are in that the company where Ronald Reagan became a free-market advocate and that used to distribute pamphlets like "What is Communism? What is Capitalism? What is the Difference to You?" is now advertising its association with government stimulus. Photographs are on the jump.

California is getting ready to ban certain big-screen televisions on the grounds that they use too much energy, the Los Angeles Times reports.

When New York state attorney general Andrew Cuomo and a group of state senators unveiled their proposal to replace the sole trustee of the $109.9 billion New York state pension fund with a new 13-member board, we were skeptical, writing, "This isn't really a reform at all, but an effort to distribute the campaign contributions from money managers, donations that are currently directed to the state comptroller, around among a larger group of politicians." We noted that a bigger board doesn't work particularly well for the New York City pension fund. At a Manhattan Institute breakfast this morning (Federal Trade Commission-mandated disclosure: I had a plastic cup of orange juice and a mini-croissant), the think tank's New York State government specialist, E.J. McMahon, was similarly skeptical, saying that when it comes to corruption, a bigger board "will make absolutely no difference." He predicted, "within ten years of creating a board of trustees you will have another pay-to-play scandal." He said the only thing that would help clean up pension-fund politics would be a defined contribution system in which investment decisions are made by hundreds of thousands of investors rather than a few politicians. This morning's case in point: California, which has a 13-member board of Calpers, along with its own pay-to-play investigation.