Senator Charles Schumer is the topic of my column this week. Mr. Schumer has the inside track to become the Democratic leader in the Senate following Harry Reid's announcement that he will retire. Please check the column out at Reason (here) or at Newsmax (here).

In a post here the other day ("Regulation Lags Technology") we noted the hassles Amazon was facing in getting U.S. government approval to test drones for package delivery. Now it emerges, in an article in the Guardian (link via Politico Playbook), the company has set up a test site in Canada, "barely 2000 feet from the U.S. border." From the Guardian:

The company's decision to set up camp in Canada, after frustration in its attempts to persuade US regulators to allow it to launch its drones in Washington state, takes Amazon's quarrel with the federal government to a new level. Last week a senior Amazon executive appeared before a US Senate subcommittee and warned that there would be consequences if federal regulators continued to act as a drag on its ambitions to launch a drone delivery service called Prime Air....

The Washington Post has a profile of Preet Bharara:

Last year during an office banquet, he insulted federal judge Naomi Reice Buchwald after she ruled against his office on a "hearsay" issue that led to an innocent verdict. Bharara told the dinner audience that what he was about to say was "hearsay" and would "not be admissible" – and then called Buchwald "the worst federal judge" he'd ever come across.

John Allison is out as CEO of the libertarian Cato Institute and Peter Goettler, a former managing director of Barclays Bank, is in, the institute announces in a press release.

More proof, as if any were needed, that blogging is not "dead": Ben Bernanke has taken up the form, over at the Brookings Institution.

The New Yorker magazine, which has been a target for criticism recently here, has had a tough week. First the magazine apologized for characterizing Senator Ted Cruz as "uppity." Then the Anti-Defamation League issued a press release critical of the magazine for publishing a "tasteless" humor article by Lena Dunham likening her Jewish boyfriend to her dog. I see it all as emblematic of a certain closed-mindedness and emptiness at the heights (or depths) of "progressive" literary intellectual culture.

The new secretary of education of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, James Peyser, has an interview with WGBH in which he talks about how the City of Boston's statutory cap on the number of charter schools is hurting children:

There are 34 charter schools in the city of Boston, the maximum number allowed under the current cap. 18,000 children are on the wait lists to attend those schools, which Peyser labeled a major issue for his department.
"To deny those parents and those children the opportunity to go to a great school when unfortunately too many of the options they have otherwise are not great seems to be totally wrong from a policy point of view and maybe even from a moral one," he said.

I'm receptive to the idea of this as a moral issue,. It would be helpful to hear Mr. Peyser — or better yet, Governor Baker — elaborate a bit and articulate the moral framework that makes it wrong.

The Economist reports on a 26-year-old MIT graduate student who has found some problem's with Thomas Piketty's book on income inequality:

Although the paper began its life as a 459-word online blog post comment, several reputable economists regard it as the most serious and substantive critique that Mr Piketty's work has yet faced...if housing wealth is the biggest source of rising wealth then a more focused approach is called for. Policy-makers should deal with the planning regulations and NIMBYism that inhibit housebuilding and which allow homeowners to capture super-normal returns on their investments.

Walmart has removed the windmills from the parking lot of its Worcester, Mass. store (which may actually be in Millbury, Mass.), the Worcester Telegram and Gazette reports. Walmart's environmental efforts were the subject of a book review here a few years ago.

From a New York Times news article about health care legislation making its way through Congress:

For years, Congress has had to settle for temporary patches to prevent deep cuts in Medicare payments to doctors, like a 21 percent cut scheduled to take effect April 1 if Congress does not intervene.
The House measure would permanently remove the threat of such cuts, and would require some higher-income Medicare beneficiaries to pay higher premiums, a change Republicans hail as a major reform.

One of the themes here is that the more complex and onerous the regulation, the more likely it is to lead to corruption when people try to get around it. Limited government leads to honest government, is one way to put it, while big government leads to favoritism, influence-peddling, and shakedowns. The immigration bureaucracy is no exception in this regard, and a good argument for more open immigration and simpler immigration law is to reduce the opportunity for special treatment of the sort outlined in this Washington Post article about a new report by the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security.

The Post article talks about how Terry McAuliffe — the Bill Clinton pal who is now governor of Virginia — asked a top Homeland Security official to speed visas for potential investors in GreenTech Automotive, his electric car company. Other prominent Democrats also got special treatment, the Post reports:

The Boston Globe has a report on how the internet retailer Amazon has negotiated state and local tax breaks for two warehouses in Massachusetts. Last year, Amazon got $600,000 in state tax credits and $2.89 million in local tax breaks for a facility in Stoughton, Mass. The second facility, in Fall River and Freetown, Mass., will benefit from $11.6 million in real estate and personal property tax breaks, along with a still undisclosed state tax credit.

I'm all for lower taxes in Massachusetts, but it would be nice if the cuts or breaks went to all taxpayers rather than to big companies with the clout to negotiate for them.

The transcript of Senator Cruz's speech at Liberty University announcing his presidential candidacy is up at the Washington Post's site and it is worth a look. I was struck by how Cruz was influenced by John F. Kennedy. Here is Mr. Cruz:

What is the promise of America? The idea that -- the revolutionary idea that this country was founded upon, which is that our rights don't come from man. They come from God Almighty.

And here is Kennedy's inaugural address:

the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe--the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.

From a policy point of view, the most intriguing thing I noticed in the Cruz speech was his tax policy:

The Israeli prime minister is the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here).

Two news articles in today's Times business section are good illustrations of the same idea — technology moves faster than regulation, and regulation slows the diffusion of technology.

The first example is electric-car maker Tesla's announcement that a remote software update "would give Tesla's Model S sedans the ability to start driving themselves, at least part of the time, in a hands-free mode that the company refers to as autopilot." The Times reports that "some industry experts said serious questions remain about whether such autonomous driving is actually legal and are skeptical that Model S owners who try to use autopilot would not run afoul of current regulations."

The second example is a story about the Federal Aviation Administration finally granting the online retailer Amazon limited approval to test drones for use in delivering packages. The Times reports: