Guess which presidential candidate, while campaigning in New Hampshire last week, said this?

"I want to be the small business president...They represent American ingenuity and hard work. But we're slipping. A recent global study showed that where we used to be one or two in the world in creating small businesses, we're now 46. It should not take longer to start a business in the United States than it takes to start one inFrance!"

The candidate continued, "I want to do everything I can to help make it easier for people to start businesses, cut that red tape....and really take a hard look at licensing requirements from state to state. There ought to be a sensible way to harmonize those, so that it's not so difficult in some states to start a businesses and much easier in the state next door to start the very same business."

Paul Gigot gets the last word — and the better of the exchange — in this Bloomberg article:

Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, who led the charge for the government, remains sanguine. He said Tuesday in a public exchange with the writer Tom Wolfe at the 92nd Street Y in New York that the court ruling wouldn't affect the vast majority of cases.

"If Congress tomorrow adopted the Wall Street Journal editorial page's view that all insider trading is awesome, which appears to be their view, then we wouldn't prosecute those cases," Bharara said. Until then, he added, "you continue to bring cases which you think are appropriate."

Paul Gigot, the newspaper's editorial page editor, responded that the "Court of Appeals didn't overturn our views on insider trading. It overturned Mr. Bharara's."

Ted Cruz was terrific, I thought, both at fighting back against the ridiculous hostile gotcha questions posed by the CNBC moderators, and in talking about his support for a commission "to get back to rules-based monetary policy." Said Cruz, "We need sound money...ideally tied to gold." Mr. Cruz also had a great pre-planned line about how the Democratic debate sounded like a debate "between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks."

Here's a bit of good news from the Republican presidential race: at least two of the candidates are talking about President Kennedy as a model.

Senator Cruz, unveiling his plan for a 10 percent flat individual income tax — and no payroll tax — in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece, writes, "As President Reagan showed—and before him, President Kennedy in the 1960s (average annual growth of 5.3%) and Presidents Harding and Coolidge in the 1920s (4.7% growth)—tax reform is a powerful lever for spurring economic expansion."

Governor Jindal, in last night's debate, said:

I want to quote to you a president. A previous president said this. He said, The problem is, is that tax rates are too high. Government income/revenues are too low. He said, paradoxically, lowering tax rates now is the best way to produce higher government revenues later.

News coverage of the Florida land company St. Joe and fund manager David Einhorn's short of it has been the subject of earlier coverage on this site here, here, here, and here. So it's worth noting just to tie up the loose end that the SEC announced earlier this week a $2.75 million civil penalty on the company. The SEC faulted the company for "improperly accounting for the declining value of its residential real estate developments during the financial crisis. As a result of this misconduct, St. Joe reported materially overstated earnings and assets in 2009 and 2010."

The Success Academy charter school network has a strong response to coverage by PBS, the Washington Post reports. The PBS ombudsman weighs in here. As the Post's Erik Wemple puts it: "Warning to journalists: If you don't tell the full story, the target of your investigations may feel obliged to do so. And that can be embarrassing."

Reason's Jim Epstein has an amazing follow-up to that New York Times series about the treatment of workers at nail salons in New York.

Politico has lively piece about the presidential hopes of Senator Ted Cruz:

Asked this weekend in Iowa how he would handle the Islamic State, Cruz replied, "Kill them all."...

"If you tried to create the perfect constitutional conservative, you would make them like Ted Cruz," [Cruz campaign manager] Roe said. "You would have them be the son of an immigrant. You would have them memorize the Constitution in their teenage years. You would have them go to the best colleges in the world. You would have them study and apprentice under the best conservative jurists. Then have them run a campaign where they had to run against the moderate establishment and beat them. Like, that's what it would be. And that's exactly what it is."

The Washington Post has published an interesting take on Theranos, the clinical laboratory company that is fighting off critical press coverage from the Wall Street Journal:

Hillary Clinton began her career in Washington as a lawyer on the staff of the House Judiciary Committee working to impeach Richard Nixon. Last week, she was on the receiving end of questioning from the House committee investigating Benghazi. The trajectory is the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here).

The office of Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, released a short statement announcing that it would move to dismiss charges against Michael Steinberg "and six other insider trading defendants."

Bloomberg reports that "In a related move, the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday dropped its civil case against five of six cooperators as well as Diamondback Capital and Level Global."

Well, that didn't take very long.

One month and one day after the New York Times article about a price increase to $750 a tablet from $13.50 for the drug Daraprim after it was bought by Martin Shkreli's Turing Pharmaceuticals, a competitor has announced it has made available an alternative that sells for "as low as $99.00 for a 100 count bottle, or at a cost of under a dollar per capsule."

From the press release from San Diego, Calif.-based Imprimis Pharmaceuticals:

"Larry Summers May Have Just Violated Square's pre-IPO Quiet Period" is the headline over an article in Business Insider.

It made me chuckle simply because of the tension inherent in imposing a "quiet period" on the voluble Professor Summers.

But there's a serious point here, which is that if the SEC's regulations are so complex or silly that not even Mr. Summers — a former Treasury secretary and Harvard president and economics professor — can't obey them, maybe they should be rethought. The idea that markets should have less information from a company in the run-up to an initial public offering has always struck me as an error on the scale of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance idea that there should be less leeway to run political campaign commercials in the 60 days prior to an election. These are moments, political and financial, where more speech and information is better, not less.

This would be a good Gordon Crovitz column for Monday's Wall Street Journal.

The president of Americans for Tax Reform, Grover Norquist, has a lovely interview with Michael Grunwald of Politico in which Mr. Norquist talks about taxes and also spending:

MG: People don't seem to like paying taxes.

Stephen Carter has a good column up at Bloomberg View:

Inequality is on everybody's lips these days -- everybody on the left, anyway, and a lot of people in the center and on the right as well. But what if everybody's wrong?

That's the contention of "On Inequality," a small, smart new volume by Princeton University philosopher Harry Frankfurt. At the very beginning, he states a simple but powerful thesis: "Our most fundamental challenge is not the fact that the incomes of Americans are widely unequal. It is, rather, the fact that too many of our people are poor." Progressives, in other words, are shooting at the wrong target. The moral problem posed by the distribution of wealth isn't inequality. It's poverty....