The Wall Street Journal Gets Randy

Galt: "You want me to be Economic Dictator?"

Mr. Thompson: "Yes!"

"And you'll obey any order I give?"

"Implicitly!"

"Then start by abolishing all income taxes."

"Oh no!" screamed Mr. Thompson, leaping to his feet. "We couldn't do that . . . How would we pay government employees?"

"Fire your government employees."

"Oh, no!"

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Abolishing the income tax. Now that really would be a genuine economic stimulus. But Mr. Obama and the Democrats in Washington want to do the opposite: to raise the income tax "for purposes of fairness" as Barack Obama puts it.

Stephen Moore in the WSJ on Atlas Shrugged and Ayn Rand and interpretation.


Sontag would not be happy.

Competition at the WSJ

“We are trying to speed up the metabolism, to create within the journalistic community a real sense of competition. We need to be ahead of the other media all of the time...We must offer mobile delivery of content because the speed of delivery changes the nature of the content itself.”

Former London Times editor Robert Thomson on his new mission: the WSJ. This from an Edelman breakfast briefing. Much more here.

Everybody's at the trust thing now...

Done gone viral...

The only way we can bring sanity back to the credit and stock markets is by restoring public trust. And to do that, we must improve the quality, accuracy, and relevance of our financial reporting. This means resisting any calls to repeal the current mark-to-market standards. And it also means expanding the requirement to the securities positions and loan commitments of all financial institutions.

From the WSJ. And its co-authors...

..Mr. Levitt was chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission from 1993 to 2001. Mr. Turner was SEC chief accountant from 1998 to 2001.

That's a byline to trust.

The Psychology of the States

There's a great interactive mapping of the psychological states of the states of America, in the WSJ.

the conscientious Floridian? The neurotic Kentuckian?

You bet - at least, according to new research on the geography of personality. Based on more than 600,000 questionnaires and published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, the study maps regional clusters of personality traits, then overlays state-by-state data on crime, health and economic development in search of correlations.