"Mexico Oil Privatization Pays Off WIth Billion-Barrel Find" is the headline over a Bloomberg News article reporting on a new billion-barrel find in an offshore field, "possible only after the government ended the monopoly of state-run Petroleos Mexicanos."

Bloomberg reports, "Mexico opened up to exploration by private companies in an effort to slow and eventually reverse the decline in its oil production."

It looks as if there is widespread agreement that individuals motivated by profit do a better job at exploring for and producing oil than government employees do. It'd be interesting to think about what activities other than oil exploration fall into that category and might also be contracted out to private firms with improved results. Operating subway systems? Educating students? Or, conversely, are there other tasks that government employees do better and should be reserved to them?

Kudos to one of my favorite judges, Jose Cabranes of the Second Circuit, for his decision and opinion vacating all counts of the criminal conviction of Sheldon Silver, the former speaker of the New York Assembly.

Judge Cabranes, writing for a panel that also included Judge Richard C. Wesley and Judge William K. Sessions III, wrote, "though we conclude that the jury instructions at Silver's trial were erroneous, we do not ascribe fault to the District Court or to the government."

The way that zoning hampers new housing construction, raising prices by constricting supply, has been a long-running theme around here (see this item from last month for an example that includes lots of links to our earlier coverage). Now two more voices have joined the issue. Here is my former New York Sun colleague, Errol Louis, now political anchor of NY1 News, writing in the Daily News, advising Democrats to seize the opportunity:

Dems also have a chance to embark on a national campaign to restart the home-building market, in part by championing local zoning rules that encourage new development. Doing so might ruffle the feathers of local environmentalists, but a pro-growth economic agenda is what voters in depressed urban and suburban swing counties are looking for.

And here is New York Times columnist David Brooks:

The Sunday New York Times has a review of Jesse Eisinger's new book The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives.

The review concludes:

While the "unelected permanent governing class" may have been willing to look the other way when highly paid bankers wrecked the economy, many of the workers who lost their jobs and families who lost their homes were not. Outside the Beltway, the fact that the Wall Street titans who blew up the financial system suffered little more than slight reductions in their bonuses only reinforced the perception that the "system" is "rigged" — with the consequences we know only too well.

The Robin Hood Foundation is a New York-based charity that has done a lot of fine work in support of education reform, and with the support of a lot of center-right donors from the financial industry. So it's disappointing to see a Time article under the byline of the Foundation's new CEO, Wes Moore, that includes this passage:

what was once a war on poverty has become a war on the poor. I say this not to cast judgement on any particular administration or political party. From the housing policies of the '70s, through the taxation policies of the '80s, the welfare and criminal justice reform efforts of the '90s, the education policies of this decade, to this new proposed health care bill; America has a shameful history of instituting policies that have put people into poverty and kept them there.

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."