The Irish Times has published a column I wrote about the theological underpinnings of American Independence, particularly as they were understood by President Kennedy. Please check the full column out here.

Our country's birthday, July 4, is a good moment for remembering that, contrary to what you hear from President Obama and from much of the press, "nationalism" isn't just another word for racism or xenophobia. My column this week gets into that with reference to the Declaration of Independence. Please check the full column out at the New York Sun (here) and Newsmax (here).

After the latest round of embarrassing subway delays and breakdowns, Governor Cuomo has brought back one of the state's more competent public-sector managers, Joseph Lhota, as chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, announced a state of emergency for the system, and offered 3 prizes of $1 million each for ideas on how to fix it.

My own solution for the problem is the same one expressed back on April 16, 2002, in the first editorial of the New York Sun, and expressed again ten years later, here at FutureOfCapitalism, back on October 29, 2012: sell the subway, in pieces, to private operators, and let them compete on the basis of safety, reliability, comfort, cleanliness, and price.

Sometimes the New York Times has an easier time understanding freedom in other countries than it does in America. A Times feature that appears in the business section asks, in a headline about France, "can the land of the 35-hour workweek overcome its cultural and regulatory barriers to surpass London and other tech hubs?"

"Regulatory barriers"? Do tell.

Sure enough, under the subheadline, "growth obstacles," the Times reports:

Taxes are high to fund France's social welfare system, and the 3,400-page labor code introduces new regulatory requirements on companies as they get larger....

When [one founder] wanted to offer stock options to lure and retain engineers and designers, the French rules were so complex that he dropped the plan. Social taxes pushed his employee costs to nearly twice what they would be in the United States...."Regulations and taxes have still not evolved enough to allow start-ups to flourish once they get off the ground," [the founder] said.

Reason.com reports:

When Preet Bharara was Manhattan's U.S. attorney, he prosecuted precisely one case in court himself. His team won the case at the time, but a district court judge just vacated one of the convictions...

The current case involves John Pauling, who had been charged with intent to distribute 100 grams or more of heroin. The district court judge, J. Paul Oetken, ruled that the prosecutors used misleading charts (which showed Pauling selling more heroin than they proved at trial), that they did not disclose those charts to the defense beforehand, and that they did not offer adequate proof of the charge, relying instead on speculation.

Preet Bharara, who had more than a half dozen of the insider trading convictions he won overturned or dismissed after an appellate court found that the legal theory they were brought under was unfounded, now has a book deal with Knopf about "integrity" and "moral reasoning" to go along with his post as "distinguished scholar in residence" at NYU Law School.

I'm looking forward to reviewing that book. Maybe some enterprising editor will ask one of Mr. Bharara's victims — like Michael Steinberg or David Ganek — to write a review. So far I haven't seen any word about how much money is involved in the advance, but if it is significant, it's worth thinking about the commercial incentives involved for a prosecutor who can cash in after overreaching by bringing criminal cases that weren't warranted.

Read the New York Times carefully enough and it's practically a textbook of free-market economic principles. Yesterday it was explaining how unintended consequences and perverse incentives in health insurance and drug treatment regulation are contributing to an opioid epidemic. Today the newspaper explains why housing prices are soaring in Washington, D.C.:

growing demand has not been matched with a supply of new homes. A combination of zoning rules and height restrictions in the city limit the developers.

Miriam Baer, a professor at Brooklyn Law School who served as an assistant U.S. attorney from 1999 to 2004 in the Southern District of New York, has a fine article in the Yale Law Journal headlined "Insider Trading's Legality Problem." It echoes and expands on some of the themes we have raised here in the past about the problems of insider trading law being devised (alternative Russell Conjugations: invented, improvised, made up out of whole cloth) by courts rather than Congress. Highlights:

Eric Weinstein has an interesting post about Russell Conjugation:

most words and phrases are actually defined not by a single dictionary description, but rather two distinct attributes:

I) The factual content of the word or phrase.
II) The emotional content of the construction.

Where words can be considered "synonyms" if they carry the same factual content (I) regardless of the emotional content (II). This however leads to the peculiar effect that the synonyms for a positive word like "whistle-blower" cannot be used in its place as they are almost universally negative (with "snitch," "fink," "tattletale" being representative examples)....

He gives firm/obstinate/pigheaded as another example. Or estate tax and death tax. Or "illegal aliens" and "undocumented immigrants."

He writes:

Mayor Bloomberg is going through one of his more sensible phases, at least on the recent evidence.

ABC News reports:

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said America should "get behind" President Trump because "the public has spoken, whether you like the results or not...We have an election — whoever wins, you got to get behind."

"He's our president, and we need this country to be run well. I didn't vote for him," Bloomberg added. "Let's just all hope that Donald Trump is a good president of the United States."...

But Bloomberg said people should still fight policies they don't agree with.

"You can protest. You can elect other officials, write letters, make phone calls," he said. "But in the end, the public has spoken, whether you like the results or not."

In the Wall Street Journal, Holman Jenkins writes a column headlined "Anatomy of a Witch Hunt":

as a colleague once said of Stalin, "[He] tries to force life into a ready-made framework. The more life resists . . . the more forcefully he mangles and breaks it."

Come to think of it, that's not a bad way of describing how the D.C. anthill has reacted to the unexpected, exotic, high-risk, possibly providential experiment of the Trump presidency.

We mean every descriptor. His very unsuitability, the mood of the American public that elected him, the obscure impasse of American politics that brought him to power—all these signs deserve more respect than they're getting.

His Torquemadas don't and can't know whether our democracy, in the improbable Mr. Trump, found a lever to move us forward, but there's something repugnant in their desire not to find out.

The online homepage of today's Boston Globe provides a textbook example of bad journalism with its coverage of a proposal to increase the Massachusetts state income tax.

Ironically, the headline comes over a more thorough, balanced, and nuanced article by Michael Levenson, who from what I can tell is one of the Globe's stronger players these days.

It begins with an on-the-record quote from Richard J. Valentine, who says he "might move to Florida rather than pay the new tax."

It reports: "New Jersey estimated that 25,000 residents who would have paid $150 million in income taxes per year left the state in the seven years following its tax increase on high earners."

It reports:

From a front-page New York Times article about drug-treatment centers in Florida that are making money by...well, let the Times itself explain it:

Robert Mueller's investigation of Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election is both a forerunner of Hillary Clinton's 2020 campaign and a replay of the insider-trading prosecutions of the past decade, I write in my column this week. Please check the column out at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here).

Excellent David Brooks column today about President Trump and Russia:

There's just something worrisome every time we find ourselves replacing politics of democracy with the politics of scandal. In democracy, the issues count, and you try to win by persuasion. You recognize that your opponents are legitimate, that they will always be there and that some form of compromise is inevitable.

In the politics of scandal, at least since Watergate, you don't have to engage in persuasion or even talk about issues. Political victories are won when you destroy your political opponents by catching them in some wrongdoing. You get seduced by the delightful possibility that your opponent will be eliminated. Politics is simply about moral superiority and personal destruction....