Richard Nixon is not high on my list of admired presidents, but something he said when he left the presidency may be worth recalling by those on all sides at this moment when comedian Kathy Griffin is in the news for posing with a blood-drenched mask of President Trump: "Always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don't win, unless you hate them. And then, you destroy yourself." Video embedded below.

Bloomberg Markets has an interview with Blackstone chairman and CEO Steve Schwarzman. Here is Mr. Schwarzman's view of President Trump:

I think that the current president is quite practical in terms of being willing to change his positions and is quite practical in terms of what's effective, what can work. He's very driven on execution and has some very strong ideas on regulatory reforms and changes in tax. I would say he's extremely pro-growth, which gets described as pro-business, but it's really pro-growth, pro-job creation. Every president has some type of ideology, and the current president is basically a capitalist who believes in efficiency. I think that's what his ideology is. So whenever he sees something that is inconsistent with efficiency, he'll abandon what he said before in order to get to execution. The previous government was different. They had a very strong ideology, which wasn't necessarily as simple as capitalism.

If that's an accurate assessment, it's not bad.

EpiPen pricing, and a New York Times article on that issue, are the topic of my column. Please check the full column out at Newsmax (here) and Reason (here).

Beit Hatfutsot, The Museum of the Jewish People, was a stop I made while on a recent trip with my family to Israel. The museum, which is on the campus of Tel Aviv University, has a relatively new and kid-friendly exhibit titled "Heroes — Trailblazers of the Jewish People." What's relevant for the FutureOfCapitalism audience is that among the heroes portrayed there are Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize winning University of Chicago economist who advocated school choice, lower taxes, and less regulation, and Ayn Rand, the novelist who also was an advocate of the individual against the state.

Though David Halberstam has been having a moment on the tenth anniversary of his death, the Halberstam who best captured the current situation was actually David's older brother, Michael Halberstam, in his 1978 novel The Wanting of Levine. That book and its fictional anticipation of President Trump were the topic of my column this past week. Please check the column out at the New York Sun (here) and Newsmax (here).

President Kennedy's 100th birthday and Donald Trump are the topic of my column in Sunday's Las Vegas Review-Journal. Please check out the full column by clicking here.

President Trump's visit to Jerusalem is an opportunity to celebrate the city's remarkable success under 50 years of unified Israeli rule, I write in my column for the Sunday Las Vegas Review-Journal. Please check the full column out by clicking here.

Toward the end of a New York Times news article about rising online sales at Walmart comes this passage:

It has also cut back on labor costs, relying more on automation. Customers at many stores can now make purchases through self-checkouts.

The company has begun testing drones to handle inventory at its labyrinthine warehouses. In March, the company received a patent for a process in which drones would transport products between departments in stores.

The Times doesn't say so, but it's almost as if increasing state and local minimum wage laws, combined with the federal mandate to provide health insurance to employees, have helped make Walmart decide that it's more cost-effective to do some jobs with machines instead of with humans.

At Bloomberg News, Matt Levine comments on the settlement between the Securities and Exchange Commission and money manager Leon Cooperman:

It is a little disappointing as a matter of incentives. What if he's totally right? What if he did nothing wrong, and could prove it in court, but would rather pay $5 million in settlement costs than $8 million to lawyers? What incentives does this settlement create for the SEC to go after the next dubious insider trading case?

Tilted New York Times coverage of Trump's proposed tax cut is the topic of my column from earlier this week. Please check out the full column at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here).

Allan Meltzer died last week, as the Wall Street Journal noted in an editorial. I interviewed him back in 2012 for a column about his book Why Capitalism?

Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting comment that it is health care costs, not high corporate tax rates, that are hurting American businesses is the topic of my column in Sunday's Las Vegas Review-Journal. Please check out the full column by clicking here.

Democrats were mad at FBI director James Comey for his (mis)handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation. Republicans were mad at him for his handling of the investigation into Russian influence on the presidential election. But there's a third way in which the Comey-era FBI — from September 2013 onward — screwed up. That involves the illegal leaks to the press about insider trading cases, about which I wrote here, here, here, here, and here.

Welfare reform as a precedent for ObamaCare repeal is the topic of my column this week. Please check out the full column at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here).

"Trump Tax Plan Brings Out the Reagan Revisionists" is the headline over my column in Sunday's Las Vegas Review-Journal, which is a rebuttal to Steven Rattner's New York Times piece of last week. Please check out my full column, revisiting the Reagan tax cuts and responding to Rattner's criticism of them, by clicking here.