The Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign store is telling prospective buyers to "allow 2-3 weeks for delivery" of a T-shirt with the Bernie 2016 logo.

A Sanders fan might say that this shows the high demand; they're essentially sold out and need to re-order. A Sanders skeptic might say that this is what you can expect under the Sanders policy prescription of socialism and protectionist isolationism on trade.

The T-shirt is "union-made and printed in the USA." Under socialist protectionist isolationism, products are made in America, which is good for a few unionized textile employees. But the result is that the shelves are bare, and consumers have to wait weeks to obtain the products they actually want.

Bloomberg has a news article about Etsy, the Brooklyn-based craft and design marketplace website, using an Irish subsidiary "that shrouds its offshore tax-cutting arrangements in secrecy."

A resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Michael Strain, has a piece in the Washington Post faulting Congress for wanting to "cut" the budget of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The article, which appears under the headline, "Congress is trying to make it harder to know how the economy is doing," is a fascinating example of how difficult it is to change anything in Washington for the better, so it's worth examining in detail.

First, it's not just the left in Washington that pushes for more spending. The American Enterprise Institute is a center-right think tank.

Sesame Workshop has reportedly cut a deal with HBO to produce 35 new "Sesame Street" episodes a year, "up from the 18 it now produces" with PBS. It's enough to make one wonder why exactly, we need a taxpayer subsidized public television network at all, if free-market capitalism can do pretty much the same thing nearly twice as productively. Maybe in the days of limited broadcast spectrum there was a reason for it, but in the era of thousands of cable channels and streaming video on the internet, it's more difficult to see the reasoning. Maybe I am missing something.

Reason has an interesting interview with John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods. Here he is talking about the minimum wage:

let's say Tom wants to go work for Whole Foods Market, and Tom is willing to work for Whole Foods for, you know, $10 an hour, and we want to hire Tom, and we think Tom is worth about $10 an hour, so we come together, and Tom's winning. We're not forcing him to work there, and he's getting benefits, he's getting opportunities to advance, learn new skills, and make more money in the future. We're gaining from it because we think he's going to be a good employee, and we think $10 is a fair wage. However, the government may not let us do that. They may say, "You can't pay Tom $10 an hour, because we're going to set a minimum wage of $15 an hour." So the government's basically saying, "We know better what's for Tom, and we know better what's for you, and we're not gonna let you guys freely come together and do voluntary exchange."

New York this week released the results of statewide standardized testing, and the numbers were a reminder that Eva Moskowitz has had a more consequential career as head of the Success Academy network of charter schools than she would have had had she won election as Manhattan Borough President.

The news that President Carter's cancer has spread is a moment to reflect on the under-appreciated achievements of our 39th president.

It's a shame that it took the ascendance of Barack Obama, a president who, unlike Mr. Carter, hardly ever cooperates with Republicans to move policy toward more free markets, to cause an appreciation of Mr. Carter's tilts toward centrist moderation. But there were some, as I trace in a couple of pages of the book JFK, Conservative.

Mr. Carter appointed as chairman of the Federal Reserve Paul Volcker, who eventually, (though too late for Mr. Carter's reelection) succeeded in reining in inflation.

Republicans should throw the "incorrigibly vulgar" Donald Trump out of the party, George Will writes in his Washington Post column.

The most interesting and underreported line to me in Hillary Clinton's college loan speech yesterday was this one: "I want to make sure that colleges spend federal dollars on things that benefit students, like teaching and research, not marketing campaigns or big salaries for administrators."

Whether Mrs. Clinton would actually follow through on this, and how, is another question. She and her husband have collected some speaking fees from colleges and universities for engagements that last a few hours — fees that dwarf what many administrators earn in a year. And certainly, the ranks of Democratic policy advisers are full of people who work as university administrators when the Republicans control the White House — Cheryl Mills, Jack Lew, Lawrence Summers, David Ellwood. (There are some Republicans who do this, too, including Glenn Hubbard and Condoleezza Rice.)

The anti-billionaire candidate, Bernie Sanders, and the billionaire candidate, Donald Trump, have more in common than you might think — and it isn't just their flyaway hair. They are the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here).

There's nothing like three hours of watching 17 Republican presidential candidates grilled by Fox News journalists to remind me why I am a political independent.

Much of the time was devoted to two topics I am just not that interested in: how to keep more immigrants out of America and how to defund Planned Parenthood.

On immigration, if prior generations of American politicians had actually implemented the policies these Republicans are advocating, maybe they could have kept Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal, and maybe John Kasich off the debate stage altogether. Heck, perhaps even the Bush ancestors could have been stopped on their way over on the Mayflower for fear that the influx of the foreigners might have depressed the wages of the existing low-skill American workers. Then the entire presidential debate could have been limited to Native Americans: Ben Nighthorse Campbell versus Elizabeth "Fauxcahontas" Warren.

To understand why the possibility that Vice President Biden will enter the presidential race is generating such excitement, look no further than Mr. Biden's remarks on May 17 at Yale University's Class Day, which were magnificent. Mr. Biden said:

the most successful and happiest people I've known understand that a good life at its core is about being personal. It's about being engaged. It's about being there for a friend or a colleague when they're injured or in an accident, remembering the birthdays, congratulating them on their marriage, celebrating the birth of their child. It's about being available to them when they're going through personal loss. It's about loving someone more than yourself, as one of your speakers have already mentioned. It all seems to get down to being personal.

That's the stuff that fosters relationships. It's the only way to breed trust in everything you do in your life.

The wealth of the presidential candidates is emerging as a campaign issue and is the topic of my column this week, which draws on the wisdom of Samuel Adams. Please check the column out at the New York Sun (here) or Reason (here).

Several of the Republican presidential candidates addressed a Koch Freedom Partners event over the weekend. I caught a webcast of some of Ted Cruz and all of Jeb Bush being interviewed by Politico's Mike Allen.

I thought Mr. Bush was strongest in the sections of the appearance when he talked about the energy revolution and about health care.

Glenn Reynolds has a good USA Today column catching President Obama getting something right — drawing attention to the problem of excessive occupational licensing requirements (is that redundant?) imposed by state and local governments. Professor Reynolds concludes:

We now have a Republican House and Senate that purport to stand up for small businesses and entrepreneurs, and a White House report that would provide bipartisan justification for such action. Will Congress do its part? Or, when it comes to promoting opportunity, is it all just talk?

Good question.