Myron Magnet is brilliant, but I'm not so sure I buy his argument in this article in the Manhattan Institute's City Journal. He says developers' concern for the 421a tax abatement is preventing them from fighting the extension of rent stabilization laws:

How the experience of the for-profit, safety-obsessed Genesee & Wyoming railroad can add to the discussion of the fatal Amtrak crash is the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here).

Further to the post here last month about the rise of non-bank lenders, the New York Times has more:

risk-taking and jobs are flowing to dozens of new alternative lenders. The start-ups aim to reinvent small-business and consumer lending by offering quicker approvals, relying on automated credit checks that include data feeds from bank accounts and tax returns, salted with inputs from social media....Bond Street is one of 25 digital small-business lenders that rely heavily on data analysis in making decisions, aiming at a market with $300 billion in outstanding loans, according to a report in April by Autonomous Research. Lending Club and several dozen other new lenders compete for an additional $450 billion in consumer and student loans. ...the loan approval rate of new small-business lenders is 62 percent, much higher than the 21 percent at traditional big banks

From a New York Times restaurant review earlier this month, explaining why a chef decided to close a pop-up ramen shop that had been open after-hours inside a bagel store:

Last week, Joshua Smookler, Mu Ramen's chef and its owner, told me "the real reason" he had decamped from the bagel shop.
"I was scared of the government finding out what we were doing," he said, even though he believed it was legal...

Either Mr. Smookler is paranoid or would-be businessmen in New York City have a well-founded fear of excessive government regulation.

The Washington Post has a fascinating dispatch on local politics in Chevy Chase, Md., a suburb of Washington:

Many who wrote in Cecere's name say their town has become farcically overregulated, rendering the simplest home additions a months-long or even years-long struggle. A tree ordinance prescribes a six-month jail term or a $1,000 fine for a second offender caught cutting without a town permit.... Property owners seeking to cut down any tree 24 inches or larger in circumference must have a permit approved by the town arborist and town manager attesting that the tree is dead, dying or hazardous.

If turned down, residents can appeal to a Tree Ordinance Board, which applies a series of nine criteria to its decision, including the overall effect on the town's tree canopy, the "uniqueness" or "desirability" of the tree in question and the applicant's willingness to plant replacement trees.

Highly recommended: The transcript of a panel discussion on poverty featuring Harvard professor Robert Putnam, President Obama, and the president of the American Enterprise Institute, Arthur Brooks. The whole thing is worth a look, but the highlight for me is this passage:

THE PRESIDENT: I'll ask Arthur for some advice on this -- because, look, the devil is in the details. I think if you talk to any of my Republican friends, they will say, number one, they care about the poor -- and I believe them. Number two, they'll say that there are some public goods that have to be made -- and I'll believe them. But when it comes to actually establishing budgets, making choices, prioritizing, that's when it starts breaking down.

The clash between President Obama and Senator Warren on fast-track trade negotiation authority is the subject of my column this week. Please check it out at Reason (here) and Newsmax (here).

Cut property taxes, Reihan Salam writes in Slate. He uses Boston as an example:

it is no coincidence that Boston's property boom followed a statewide cap on property taxes that went into effect in 1982. Homeowners no longer feared that their property taxes would increase without limit, so more and more of them were willing to invest. While Boston lost 30 percent of its residents between 1950 and 1980, it gained 5 percent over the next two decades and the median household income in the city increased 38 percent faster than the national average from 1979 to 2005. ...When the Massachusetts property tax cap was being debated, many feared that cities like Boston would be starved of revenue as services collapsed. Instead, a rush of new investment and economic activity led to healthy increases in property tax revenues.

From a New York Times account of a plan by Hillary Clinton's brother Tony Rodham to get a Chicago-area contractor involved in post-earthquake rebuilding efforts in Haiti: "Mr. Rodham projected that he could make $1 million on the Haiti deal if it came to pass — enough money, he said in his court testimony, to take his family to Disney World and cover his debts, including his legal bills and his long overdue federal taxes."

Charles Murray's new book, By The People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission, was excerpted over the weekend by the Wall Street Journal:

The laws setting out these crimes are often so complicated that only lawyers, working in teams, know everything that the law requires. Everyone knows how to obey the laws against robbery. No individual can know how to "obey" laws such as Sarbanes-Oxley (810 pages), the Affordable Care Act (1,024 pages) or Dodd-Frank (2,300 pages). We submit to them....

Let's withhold that compliance through systematic civil disobedience. Not for all regulations, but for the pointless, stupid and tyrannical ones.

As if the taxpayer-funded University of Pennsylvania professor calling for tax rates higher than 90% on the top 1% of earners weren't enough, now Harvard University Press, building on its "success" with Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century, "the fastest-selling book in the press's nearly 102-year history" is out with a new book calling for a 65% top marginal tax rate at the national level. The New York Times is doing its best to hype the book, having published not one but two columns in the past week touting the book and the 65% rate proposal.

Michigan voters Tuesday, by a resounding margin, rejected a sales and gas tax increase backed by a Republican governor, Rick Snyder, who said it would fund road and bridge improvements. Americans for Tax Reform has the details.

On the other hand, in Brookline, Mass., the tax rebellion I wrote about in my column failed to win enough votes; a property tax increase aimed at funding schools passed by a 61% to 39% margin. That's substantial, but it also probably means that some significant portion of voters who backed President Obama and Elizabeth Warren (who ran at 79% and 74% in Brookline) opposed the tax increase. More details here.

The Department of Justice is conducting a criminal investigation into leaks of information from a September 2012 meeting of the Federal Reserve's Federal Open Market Committee, the group that guides America's monetary policy, according to a report in the New York Times.

In a May 4, 2015 letter to Jeb Hensarling, the chairman of the House financial services committee, and to Sean Duffy, the chairman of its subcommittee on oversight and investigations, the chair of the Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen, advised that she and her colleagues "take seriously our commitment to maintain the confidentiality of our deliberations and planning. We recognize, in particular, the importance of safeguarding confidential information that could advantage individuals who obtain access to it."

Between 2011 and 2014, 96% of the political contributions made by Harvard's faculty of arts and sciences went to Democrats, according to a Crimson report picked up by KC Johnson at the Manhattan Institute's Minding the Campus blog. At Harvard's graduate school of education, 100% of the faculty who made political contributions gave to Democrats.

Capital New York reports:

A 2012 federal transportation bill had the inadvertent effect of placing some New York City streets under the jurisdiction of the 1965 Highway Beautification Act, legislation that restricts signage on the National Highway System. Times Square's massive billboards exceed the Beautification Act's size requirements, which limit signs to 1,200 square feet. Now the city Department of Transportation is under federal pressure to remove the billboards or pay up, D.O.T. commissioner Polly Trottenberg says...

as part of the National Highway System, these Manhattan streets must now comply with federal requirements, including the Highway Beautification Act, a Johnson-era regulation intended to reduce the presence of billboards on highways. ...Failure to comply with the Beautification Act is penalized by a 10 percent reduction in a state's federal highway funds.