Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, Members of Congress, my fellow Americans:

We are fifteen years into this new century. Fifteen years that dawned with terror touching our shores; that unfolded with a new generation fighting two long and costly wars; that saw a vicious recession spread across our nation and the world. It has been, and still is, a hard time for many.

But tonight, we turn the page. [Well there's some wishful thinking, about turning the page on the war with the terrorists, just as ISIS releases video of Japanese hostages and Islamic militants murder Jews and cartoonists at Paris.]

The president of the Club for Growth, David McIntosh, has sent a letter to Speaker Boehner and Majority Leader McConnell laying down some markers for the economic policy agenda in the Congress ahead. The key points:

Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney have both kicked off their embryonic presidential campaigns by talking about income inequality.

From the "what we believe" section of Mr. Bush's "Right To Rise" Political Action Committee:

While the last eight years have been pretty good ones for top earners, they've been a lost decade for the rest of America....We believe the income gap is real, but that only conservative principles can solve it by removing the barriers to upward mobility.

Note the reference to the "income gap," like candidate John Kennedy talking about the "missile gap" between the U.S. and the Soviet Union (which turned out to be overstated if not imaginary).

From a New York Times report on Mr. Romney's remarks to the Republican National Committee:

"White #BlackLivesMatter Boston Protesters Found Living with Parents in Luxury Mansions" is the headline over a Gateway Pundit post about some local reporters in Boston who tried to track down the protesters arrested for blocking highway traffic in Boston rush hour by chaining themselves to cement-filled barrels. It's not clear that the story entirely justifies the headline, but it's close enough that it's worth a smile, or an eye-roll.

Meanwhile, the mayor of Boston, Marty Walsh, a Democrat, has fired a part-time city employee as punishment for having participated in the protest.

President Obama's proposed $320 billion over-ten-years tax increase is the subject of my column this week:

Some day, when historians look back on the Obama administration, the Saturday night tax-grab will loom right up there with Benghazi, the broken ObamaCare web site, and the je suis Charlie no-show as one of this presidency's lowest moments.

Low, but telling, because it shows how this administration approaches tax policy not from the point of view of raising the revenues necessary to run the government, and not from the view of creating the maximum incentives for growth and innovation, but rather as a kind of zero-sum, redistributionist means of political warfare. It is tax policy as power and punishment, tax policy as vengeance.

The "Black Lives Matter" protesters in Boston who blocked highways by chaining themselves to 1,200-pound cement barrels during morning rush hour caused at least one ambulance to be diverted. CBS News, which has the story, says the condition of the patient in the ambulance hasn't been disclosed. Nor does the article mention the race of the patient in the ambulance.

This one is a bit far afield from our usual subject matter here, but it seems like blocking rush hour traffic is a good way to express anger and get attention, but not a very good way to increase popular support for a cause.

A court filing offers a hint that the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, plans to appeal last month's Second Circuit ruling dismissing two insider trading cases. A Bloomberg News article reports on a filing in another case in which prosecutors wrote that the ruling "dramatically (and in our view, wrongly) departs from 30 years of controlling Supreme Court authority and, in so doing, legalizes manipulative and deceptive conduct that no court has ever sanctioned."

Our coverage of the issue is linked here.

Peter Berkowitz writes:

to combine and to reconcile the competing demands of liberty and tradition—the defining task of modern American conservatism—has never been more daunting.

Much as some fiscal conservatives would like to deny the connection, limited government cannot be separated from the character of its citizens. If individuals are not determined to make decisions for themselves and take responsibility for their lives; if they are not nurtured by family, rooted in community and sustained by faith or a firm sense of duty; and if they are not educated to grasp the principles of freedom and to appreciate freedom's blessings—then they will not experience an increasingly activist and ever-expanding government as an affront and a danger. To the contrary, they will welcome it as a comfort and a consolation.

The social welfare states of Northern Europe aren't the egalitarian liberal utopias they are cracked up to be, writes Michael Booth in The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia, reviewed by Kyle Smith in the New York Post.

The French prime minister's clumsy attempt to whitewash his country's history of anti-Semitism is the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at the New York Sun (here) and Newsmax (here).

With a New York Times editorial condemning the New York Police Department's work slowdown as "reckless" "madness" that is "damaging the social order," perhaps it's worth considering the — heretical, I know — possibility that less police activity might actually not be such a bad thing.

Not all situations without police degenerate into violent anarchy, after all. Many of them evolve into patterns of spontaneous order. One way to see that is this YouTube video of traffic in Vietnam (here's another, shorter one). No one is directing the traffic, yet most everyone gets where they are going safely.

The "what we believe" statement up on the Web site of Jeb Bush's new "Right To Rise" political action committee is worth a look for a lot of reasons, but one of them is the way it shows how the ideas of conservative policy intellectuals filter into the language of actual, real-life politicians.

The first sentence of the statement is, "We believe passionately that the Right to Rise — to move up the income ladder based on merit, hard work and earned success — is the central moral promise of American economic life." The phrase "earned success" should be familiar to readers of this site from our coverage of the president of the American Enterprise Institute, Arthur Brooks, who possibly coined but definitely popularized the term.

Bob McTeer has a perceptive, if pessimistic, post about the recent congressional debate over school lunches:

The outcome was billed as a defeat for the First Lady—who had vowed to fight to the bitter end—and her allies who supported whole and multi-grain bread for school lunches, especially in pasta and tortillas. There was also a side issue involving appropriate salt content and even provisions regarding green-house emissions from farm animals—from both ends, I believe.

I don't doubt that whole grain bread is more nutritious than the white bread I grew up on. Less salt is probably better as well, although salt tastes awfully good. What gets me is the idea—common these days—that, if something is a good idea, it's a good idea to pass it into law.

Wages should be higher; pass a law. Work weeks should be shorter, pass a law. A federal law at that. Regarding school lunches, what about parents getting together with the principal? Or, maybe even the local school board?

Jeb Bush's record as governor of Florida, as recounted in the book Conservative Hurricane: How Jeb Bush Remade Florida, by Matthew T. Corrigan, is the topic of my column this week: Don't underestimate Jeb Bush. Please check the column out at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), or Newsmax (here).

Politico's Michael Grunwald takes a look at the federal government's $3.2 trillion in outstanding loans, up from $1.3 trillion a decade ago. "As a Washington austerity push has restrained direct spending, many credit programs have kept expanding, in part because they help politicians dole out money without looking like they're spending," he explains.

Mr. Grunwald's article touches on some of the rules governing how Washington works, some of which are known to economists as public choice theory. One of these rules is that small groups of intensely interested parties win out over large groups of only casually interested parties. Or, as he puts it, "Since fishermen in the Northwest Halibut/Sablefish and Alaska King Crab fisheries got their own $24 million loan program, it's a good bet that nobody's paid closer attention to it on Capitol Hill than their lobbyists."