B.Nvididos, that's California, but welcome to the November 19th edition of National Reviews, Radio Free California podcast.

I'm Will Swain, president to the California Policy

Center. I should say I was just promoted. I'm CEO. Thanks, David. You can find my friend and

co-host David Bonson right there. He's an economist, the host of the Capitol Record podcast.

He's author of the book, full-time, work in the meaning of life. And of course, he's founder of the

eponymous investment firm, the Bonson Group. Hello, David. Hello, Will. Congratulations on your promotion. I've actually

been demoted. I'm now running for a local office. New York City mayor? Yeah. All right.

Hey, lots of finance news that I want to talk to you about, but not exclusively

finance news. One of our listeners, good old Adam, sent us this story. Here's the headline

from Yahoo Sports. Big Ten's $2.4 billion private capital plan is paused after Michigan and USC opposition.

The subhead for the story kind of tells the rest of it.

The conference was trying to strike a deal with a California pension fund in an exchange

for a 10% stake in Big Ten enterprises.

So, David, this strikes me as one of those things that should infuriate

free market people. We've got a government pension, which I guess is charged with making investments.

Those investments are going to be in the private sector. So this is not quite the same thing.

We see at the White House right now with taking stakes in U.S. deal or Intel. But there is this

deal. I'll just explain it real quickly from the story. The conference is trying to get $2.4 billion

from the California pension fund as an investment. And then all of a sudden there was a kind of a

mutiny, USC, not an entire mutiny, USC in Michigan said, no, no,

they didn't want to be involved in this. They thought this deal would be unfair to them, because it

would basically disperse $135 million by some formula among all 16 schools. And Michigan called it,

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