Commentary

Black Gets Bail . Conrad Black has been granted bail. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, over the protests of the U.S. government, has granted Conrad Black bail while his appeal is heard by the circuit court, following the Supreme Court's decision in the "honest services" case of Jeffrey Skilling. Market Cop. Last Saturday, writing about the Goldman Sachs settlement, I mentioned in passing the remarks of the rabidly anti-capitalist U.S. Senator Carl Levin, who mischaracterized the Goldman settlement as being tantamount to a confession of guilt. The lie was standard Levin, but I must admit that the senator was fully entitled to gloat. After all, he had won. Goldman had said it would fight, and it didn’t.

Jul 19, 2010

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On June 24, the Supreme Court ordered the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago to reconsider the conviction of Conrad Black in light of the high court's rulinig in the “honest services” decision in Skilling v. United States . Predictably, the prosecutors in Black's case are arguing that he should not be free on bail while his appeal is being heard.

Jul 17, 2010

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Hang your clothes on a hickory limb / But don't go near the water. That seems to be the message of Rep. Henry Waxman's bill to limit the conditions under which a person may drill for oil. According to Marlo Lewis of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Waxman restriction is simply that the would-be driller first accomplish the impossible. After that, he may go right ahead.

Jul 17, 2010

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On July 12, The Washington Post ran a fascinating interview with Mark Thornton, Senior Vice President, Product Development, and Chief Medical Officer at Novavax. Inspiringly, the story was headlined “A career built on bringing livesaving drugs to the market and to patients.” And, for the most part, Thornton’s career is every bit as admirable as the headline makes it sound. “In college,” he tells us, “I fell in love with the notion of correcting a disease and making a person better by giving them a pharmaceutical.” And he ends the interview by commenting: “At Novavax, I can help bring these products to the marketplace and to patients.”

Jul 17, 2010

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The Washington Post today offered those few of us unwilling to read the 2,300-page Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill a cartoon summary of what it all means: “Reinventing Financial Regulation,” by Brady Dennis and Alberto Cuadra. It is not entirely clear to me who did the text and who did the graphics. But the essence of the Consumer Protection provision is clearly stated (and illustrated): “In the lead up to the financial crisis, seven regulators shared responsibility for looking out for consumers of mortgages, credit cards, and other such loans, but none treated consumers as a top priority.”

Jul 16, 2010

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Richard Scrushy, former HealthSouth Corp. chairman, today filed a motion with the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, seeking to be released from prison while the court reconsiders his 2006 conviction, as the Supreme Court ordered it to do following the high court’s “honest services” decision.

Jul 15, 2010

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“Waterboarding” is a controversial procedure in which interrogators compel a target to cooperate by making him feel as though he is dying—specifically, by making him feel that he is drowning. I am not convinced that it amounts to torture, or that its use against Islamic jihadists is wrong. But I am convinced that U.S. prosecutors have devised a metaphorical form of waterboarding, which they regularly employ against innocent businessmen. They have discovered a means by which they can convince a businessman who is not even suspected of a crime that his company—to which he may have devoted his life—will be killed if he does not cooperate with them. And that, I think, is wrong.

Jul 14, 2010

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The ever-stalwart Tom Kirkendall, of Houston’s Clear Thinkers, writes today about the plight of former Merrill Lynch executive James Brown , one of the last Enron figures still pursued by our Javert-like Department of Justice (sic). My own take on Enron, now, is that it involved some financial fraud, notably by Andy Fastow and a couple of his cronies, but that it also involved what Rob Bradley has called “philosophical fraud” and I have called postmodernism . Under the circumstances, I think we need to say of its dubious but non-frauduent practices something similar to what ACLU types often say of disagreeable speakers: “I disagree entirely with the way you conduct your business, but I shall defend to the death your right to conduct it as you see fit.” The invaluable Professor St

Jul 13, 2010

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The New York Times headline the other day was utterly predictable in its class-warfare connotations: "Biggest Defaulters on Mortgages Are the Rich." Indeed, it was so predictable that I confess I did not even try to read through the story (by David Streifeld, who formerly covered the adversary culture for the Washington Post) to find out how the statistics had been manipulated to yield to the desired result. Fortunately, someone else did.

Jul 12, 2010

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According to Eric Dash’s article in the NYT ( “A Film That Explores Humanity on Wall Street” ), Kevin Spacey has a new Wall Street film coming out: “Margin Call.” The headline is taken from Spacey’s comment: “I am trying to humanize bankers.” But Dash opens his article with the remark “Finding humanity on Wall Street, some might say, can be a little like finding a good mortgage in a bundle of C.D.O’s. Traders, after all, tend to pride themselves on their dispassionate objectivity.” Notice how exactly backwards that is. Subprime mortgages were precisely those based not on “objectivity” but on “humanity.”

Jul 12, 2010

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Spitzer Insurance case is tossed. More on this to come , but it seems that one of the cases launched against insurers by Eliot Spitzer way back when he was New York’s attorney general has finally been thrown out. It has taken five years. Can you imagine what these men have gone through during that time? I do not yet know the particulars of the case, but here was my article on Spitzer’s Reign of Terror .

Jul 11, 2010

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For the last 200 or 300 years, collectivists of various stripes have been screaming that we must protect people from free markets. Well, I am beginning to see their point. Except that I turn it around: We must protect markets from people. Consider: If we suddenly declared that minors, of any age, had to be allowed to enter into whatever bargains and contracts they wished, would we not simultaneously restrict markets severely in order to prevent those minors from hurting themselves?

Jul 11, 2010

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Here is an absoutely fascinating, if completly obtuse, article by the leftist WaPo columnist Ezra Klein . What is both fascinating, and obtuse, about Klein's column is its utter obliviousness to the nature of power. The ideal bureaucrat, in Klein’s view, is a scientific person indifferent to material wealth who wants only the ability to institute his judgments, independent of public favor or commercial concerns.

Jul 10, 2010

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According to a report at Securities Docket : “In Ireland, an official at the Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement, the country’s corporate watchdog, acknowledged that no one prosecuted for white-collar crime by the ODCE has been jailed in the 10-year history of the office.”

Jul 10, 2010

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Two Government Defeats in Securities Cases. I wrote recently on the SEC’s defeat in the Rorech and Negrim case (alleging insider trading) and I briefly mentioned the Bristol-Myers case . Peter J. Henning, who writes about white-collar cases for the NYT (and is a professor of law at Wayne State University Law School) discusses both cases in this column: “Two More Setbacks in Securities Fraud Cases.”

Jul 9, 2010

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The Wall Street Journal editorial page apologizes to Conrad Black . This is good to read, although the WSJ editorialists are perhaps the least culpable of all media in the persecution of businessmen. The truly vicious do not apologize. Ungrateful Wretches. According to an article at Forbes.com: “A group of 49 individual ticket buyers who say the proposed $3 billion merger between UAL Corp.’s United Air Lines Inc. and Continental Airlines Inc. would hurt airline industry competition have filed a fuit seeking to stop the deal ( “Ticket Buyers Sue To Stop $3B Continental-United Deal” ). This is the ultimate consequence of all those economic theorists, from Adam Smith on, who have attempted to justify capitalism morally by arguing its subservience to the consumer. The producer must obey the orders of the consumer, they said. Very well, reply these consumers of air travel, we shall give the producers orders, and we shall have them legally enforced. “For Whom the Dell Tolls” Carolyn Horner, writing on the blog OpenMarket.org, argues that the highly competitive market for personal computers should serve as a warning to antitrust persecutors who want to target an

Jul 7, 2010

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Photographer Daniella Zalcman spends a day with the street musicians and vendors of New York City. They might not be wearing suits or working at a computer, but they are taking an entrepreneurial approach to their life: being proactive, trading value for value, and persevering past obstacles in order to get one step closer to happiness.

Jul 3, 2010

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Daniella Zalcman

er 2010 issue -- We’ve launched. Yes, we threw the switch and nothing blew up. On our new website that is. You can find it at www.atlassociety.org/tni. This is the new home for our print magazine as well as for web-only features. Each article comes with an “auto-podcasting” feature—meaning you can listen to any TNI print article over your computer speakers, or you can download it as an mp3 file. Now you can listen to TNI on a train, in a plane, or in a box with a fox. Anywhere you like. You also won’t want to miss our Live Discussions—text-based Q&A with various authors and opinion leaders. The TNI web home is part of a larger web-world, produced by our publisher, The Atlas Society. Visit the section next to TNI, and you’ll find the society’s new Business Rights Center, headed by the irreplaceable Roger Donway. Don’t miss his “Business Rights Watch” blog. You can also find interactive webinars to attend, free of charge, on intriguing issues, like individual rights. Understanding these issues will help you to understand the “clockwork” behind current events. The interactivity includes live opinion polling, Q&A, and virtual breakout rooms for concurrent discussions on different topics.

Jul 2, 2010

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The son of a frustrated concert pianist, Cope remembers crawling around under his father’s piano listening to the music of Chopin, Schumann, and Rachmaninov. “No matter how hard I tried I could not escape from the fact that I was a musician, and that was my destiny,” Cope explains. “Music is what I am.”

Jul 1, 2010

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On Cope’s book, Experiments in Musical Intelligence: “In twenty years of working in artificial intelligence, I have run across nothing more thought-provoking than David Cope’s Experiments in Musical Intelligence. What is the essence of musical style, indeed of music itself? Can great new music emerge from the extraction and recombination of patterns in earlier music? Are the deepest of human emotions triggerable by computer patterns of notes?

Jul 1, 2010

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