Thanks again to those readers who pitched in this week and either bought new subscriptions to this site or renewed old ones. If everyone reading this did the same thing, we'd have enough money to hire more writers or reporters to create additional content, or to do some promotion that could increase our reach and influence. So if you've been on the fence or reluctant or meaning to get around to it, consider this the final reminder, at least for a few months. Your paid subscription sends an encouraging message of support for the content here and helps maintain the quality and independence of FutureOfCapitalism. The link to help out is here.

Bruce Springsteen is the Broadway star of the moment.

His new show is sold out, with tickets on resale websites available at prices approaching $10,000 a seat. It is replacing "Hamilton" as the Broadway show that most resonates in the contemporary context.

The Springsteen show arrived on Broadway, at least figuratively, from Washington. D.C., or, more precisely, from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. In November 2016 President Obama awarded Springsteen the Medal of Freedom. Springsteen returned the favor by playing a 15-song farewell concert in January 2017 for Obama and his staff. The set list as published included many classics. Conspicuously absent, though, was one of the Boss's greatest songs, "Wrecking Ball." If it had been included, it would have been hauntingly apt, considering what was on the way.

Thanks again to all of you who have pitched in and become paying subscribers to FutureOfCapitalism. We plan to wrap this drive up tomorrow, but we could use just a few more members to meet our goals and to help fund the site's continued operations, independence, quality, and growth. If you've been meaning to get to it, please take this as a reminder to go ahead and take the plunge. Thanks. It won't take much time. The entry-level membership is less than $1 a week and will send an encouraging signal of support. The link is here.

Trump aide Gary Cohn, "raised the possibility of increasing the federal gasoline tax next year to help pay for the administration's $1 trillion infrastructure plan," Bloomberg News reports, adding:

Representative Mike Simpson, a Republican from Idaho, said he would support an increase.

"It's a user fee," Simpson said. "We've got to convince people that the money goes to roads and bridges and not all the other bull."

People are going to have a hard time being "convinced" of that so long as it isn't true. I don't know Mr. Simpson or his constituents but it's either insulting or comical that he thinks that they can be so easily conned by the semantics of renaming a tax a "user fee."

The response so far to the renewal email and the drive here for paying subscribers has been wonderfully heartening and encouraging. Thanks to those of you who have become paying members or who have renewed previous memberships. Your support will help support the quality and independence of the news and information here. To clarify a few issues that people have asked about: You don't need a PayPal account to pay – you can use a credit card as a "guest." If you can't figure out how to work that, let us know and we will talk you through it. Or if you prefer to pay by check or in an amount other than one of the choices listed, let us know and we can help with that, too. The contact info is on our "about" page here and the link to join, renew, or pay is here. Thank you!

Excessive government regulation of locally produced food is enough to turn even liberals into libertarians, at least on this particular issue, as we noted in an item here a few years back.

Two recent news items reinforce the idea that food and wine are becoming a battleground for economic freedom.

A wine column by Eric Asimov in the New York Times food section runs under the headline "Wines Are No Longer Free To Travel Across State Lines." It reports on successful lobbying by wholesalers to outlaw interstate wine sales. The column concludes:

around the country it means fewer choices for consumers. Curtailing out-of-state shipping only makes it worse.

In an age where you can order just about anything on the internet, including wine, consumers deserve safe access to great retailers over state borders.

Bloomberg News has a really interesting piece about how the "value of a statistical life" that the government uses for regulatory purposes — $10 million at the EPA, $9.5 million at the FDA, $9.6 million at the Department of Transportation — is sharply higher than other measures, such as lifetime earnings for college graduates, jury wrongful death awards, or life insurance policy face values.

The piece is headlined "No One Values Your Life More Than The Federal Government." It reports that the value used in the government calculations has soared over time, affecting calculations the costs and benefits of certain regulations: "As VSLs have increased, once marginally beneficial safety measures can suddenly yield benefits far in excess of costs—meaning proposed regulations left for dead can have new life."

The NFL player protests against police brutality are the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at Newsmax here.

Thank you to those readers who responded to yesterday's "How To Help" post by becoming paying subscribers to FutureOfCapitalism. Your paid subscription helps make everything here possible and will allow us to keep growing, expanding, and improving. An entry-level subscription is less than $1 a week, and the transaction won't take much of your time at all. Please signal your enthusiasm and support for the content here by taking a moment right now and joining this community. The link is here.

We haven't asked for reader support here since the first half of 2015. But at this juncture we're confident enough of the site's future that we're asking readers to pitch in with some money to help support our operations.

Briefly: If you value the content you find here, please signal it by becoming a paying subscriber or sustaining subscriber using the links at the link here.

Your editor is not ensconced at some think tank or university. This is how he (I) makes his (my) living.

There aren't many places on the web that are neither cheerleading for Trump nor panicked over him. If you value non-shrill, non-hysterical, civil news and commentary, the way to get more of it is to pay for it.

We haven't raised the prices here since we set up shop in 2009. More paying readers might fund additional content at the site or better promotion of the existing content. We are competing against news organizations that benefit from taxpayer funding (NPR, PBS) or the backing of deep-pocketed foreign owners (the New York Times' Carlos Slim).

A column I wrote back in March focused on crowdfunding as a possible partial solution to the problem of medical expenses.

Today's New York Times sports section carries an article on the front of the section about a tennis player, Alicia Black. who "raised $40,180 in a little over a month through an internet crowdfunding campaign" to help pay for hip surgery and rehabilitation. Another donor paid her orthodontist bill. Black's campaign was hosted by GoFundMe, which I wrote about in the March column.

The troubles at the Newseum, a museum in Washington that is about journalism and news, are the topic of a New York Times news article. The article quotes a former Newseum board member, Wayne Reynolds, who says the museum is having difficulty competing against the taxpayer-funded museums operated by the Smithsonian, which offer free admission:

Mr. Reynolds said he was a museum trustee for about a year before resigning in 2015. Among the reasons he cited for leaving: "Their unwillingness to change their direction."

Among his objections: the size of the admission fee, which he said was an obstacle to building attendance.

"It's the fact that they're charging $24 a person to go through a place," Mr. Reynolds said. "Every other place that they are competing against along the Mall is free."

President Carter gave an interview to Maureen Dowd of the New York Times. Her report of it includes this passage:

"I think the media have been harder on Trump than any other president certainly that I've known about," Carter replied. "I think they feel free to claim that Trump is mentally deranged and everything else without hesitation."

George W. Bush's speech is widely being interpreted as an attack on Trump or Trumpism, and maybe it was, but there's an alternative possible reading of it. I'm thinking of the sentence in which Mr. Bush says, "our democracy needs a media that is transparent, accurate and fair." That seemed to me like an endorsement of Trump's press criticism. As for the parts of the speech supporting "free markets" and denouncing "bigotry," they can be read as attacks on Trump but they also can be read as Bush critiquing himself for Sarbanes-Oxley, for the actions to seize Fannie Mae and AIG precipitating the financial crisis, or for the Republican Party's participation in a series of anti-gay-marriage ballot initiatives that coincided with Mr. Bush's presidential re-election in 2004, the same year Mr. Bush called for a Constitutional ban on same-sex marriage.

Lawyer Harvey Silverglate, who overlapped with Robert Mueller at Princeton University and who dealt with him personally on at least a couple of cases, has what I thought was a pretty interesting column running at the WGBH website under the headline "How Robert Mueller Tried To Entrap Me":

I have known Mueller during key moments of his career as a federal prosecutor. My experience has taught me to approach whatever he does in the Trump investigation with a requisite degree of skepticism or, at the very least, extreme caution.