A New York Times news article by Charlie Savage and Mitch Smith reports: "The Trump Justice Department's aggressive use of criminal charges to pursue officials suspected of making unauthorized disclosures to the public is a continuation of a practice that developed during the Bush administration and accelerated under the Obama administration."

The Drudge Report this afternoon is leading with a Hillary 2020 story, or trial balloon, or something. Let me just say that you read it here first. If the Democratic presidential campaign is among Bernie Sanders, Michael Bloomberg, and Joe Biden, or if the strongest woman candidate the Democrats can muster is Elizabeth Warren, why would Hillary Clinton stay out?

David Brooks writes in his New York Times column:

What is new is how cultish this dispute has become. The researchers asked a wide variety of questions, on everything from child-rearing to national anthem protests. In many cases, 97 to 99 percent of Progressive Activists said one thing and 93 to 95 percent of Dedicated Conservatives said the opposite. There's little evidence of individual thought, just cult conformity. The current situation really does begin to look like the religious wars that ripped through Europe after the invention of the printing press, except that our religions now wear pagan political garb.

Thanks for all those who became paying subscribers or members of FutureOfCapitalism during our recent drive. Before returning entirely to our regularly scheduled programming, let me mention that are also ways to help that are non-monetary. Spreading the word by telling your friends about the site, particularly friends that you think might enjoy it, helps us grow. So does sharing FutureOfCapitalism content on social media, if you use social media. Commenting by using the comments function helps, too, not only if you have something interesting to say (though that's great), but also because comments help signal to algorithms and to other readers that there's a community of engaged readers here.

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The Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing by Sears Holdings is the topic of my column this week. Please check the column out in full at Reason here, at the New York Sun here, and at Newsmax here.

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The mismatch between two numbers — the amount of money Beto O'Rourke, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Texas who is running against Ted Cruz, has raised, and the amount of support he is getting in recent polls — is generating some lively commentary.

The editor of the Washington Free Beacon, Matthew Continetti, commenting on O'Rourke's haul of $38.1 million in the past three months, observed, "The media may have made a strategic mistake in creating the Beto phenomenon, drawing away tens of millions of dollars from more competitive races."

Nate Silver, the election forecaster, acknowledged that O'Rourke's numbers have been slipping: "he's gone from a deficit of 3-4 points at his peak to 5-6 now. That's not great; TX has gone from 'Lean R' to 'Likely R'." Silver writes that the race is "not to the point where Dems should be donating 60 zillion $$ to his campaign."

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President Trump, commenting on a decline in the stock market, said, "I think the Fed is making a mistake. They are so tight. I think the Fed has gone crazy...Actually, it's a correction that we've been waiting for for a long time, but I really disagree with what the Fed is doing."

Trump will be ritualistically denounced for interfering with the Fed's much-prized "independence," but the truth is that under our Constitution the power "To coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures" is granted to neither the president nor the Fed but to Congress.

The long stock market upswing and the low unemployment of recent years have made grumbling about the Fed less fashionable than it was in, say, 2009 or 2010. But the lyrics of Hayek in the Hayek vs. Keynes Rap — "There's a boom and bust cycle and good reason to fear it" — are as relevant as they ever were.

Some staggering numbers in an upcoming grim New York Times Magazine article about the heroin epidemic in Philadelphia, Pa.: "The city's Department of Health estimates that 75,000 residents are addicted to heroin and other opioids...There had been more than 1,200 overdose deaths in Philadelphia in 2017 — a 34 percent rise from 2016."

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Preet Bharara and an SEC commissioner, Robert J. Jackson Jr., have an op-ed in the New York Times acknowledging "a good bit of insider trading law remains ambiguous" and describing "uncertainty," and "a legal haziness that leaves both investors and defendants unclear about what sorts of information-sharing or other activities by investors would be considered insider trading, and what are the acceptable forms of data-gathering and research that are part of any healthy, functioning financial marketplace."

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Former Treasury secretary and Harvard president Lawrence Summers reports on a recent road trip:

We were also struck by how remote the concerns of the coasts seemed. Televisions in bars and restaurants were rarely turned to news channels. No one seemed terribly concerned with the controversy over then-Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh. We saw 15 roadside signs opposing abortion for every other political sign of any kind....Americans want to live in very different ways. Perhaps more appreciation of that on the part of those who lead our society could strengthen and unify our country at what is surely a complex and difficult moment in its history.

Better to discover this late than never, I guess.