The Boston Globe has an article about how the Dodd-Frank law is forcing a carpenter's union to float an initial public offering of a bank that it had founded:

The transformation of the 30-year-old institution was triggered by financial reforms designed to curb the speculative investments by banks that contributed to the recent economic crisis. The Dodd-Frank Act requires a firewall between an institution's traditional banking practice and its trading and investment activities.

Since the New England and New York carpenters' pension funds own a majority stake in the bank, they are barred from engaging in investments that are common among pension funds, such as in private equity and real estate, said Mark Erlich, executive secretary for the New England Regional Council of Carpenters and chairman of the pension fund.

The Cato Institute has a post flagging a Florida property rights case involving a city ordinance that bars ocean-front property owners from building docks:

Sanibel passed an ordinance forbidding the Kentners and others from taking advantage of this common-law right. The city claimed that the ordinance was necessary to protect seagrass, which it called an "invaluable natural resource."

Whether or not seagrass is invaluable, the city passed the ordinance without considering whether seagrass was actually present in the areas subject to the ordinance and whether modern technology could effectively be used to avoid harming the seagrass. Moreover, there is evidence that the city passed the ordinance in order to satisfy the aesthetic preferences of certain interest groups and to enhance the property values of other dock-holders. On top of that, in 2006 the city issued itself an exemption to build a dock in San Carlos Bay, explaining that it should be allowed to build a dock because no seagrass was found on the site.

Pressure is already building on the new Congress to borrow and spend more on roads, bridges, sewers, airports, or other "infrastructure" projects. My column this week gives nine reasons why this isn't necessarily a great idea. Please check the column out at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here).

Richard Epstein, who is a consultant to some institutional investors involved in the litigation over whether the government's seizure of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was an illegal taking from the shareholders in the companies, has an update on the litigation up at Forbes.

Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein advises Republicans to read Hayek:

in the current period, Hayek's "radical position" would entail a strong commitment to free trade, a rejection of protectionism, decreased regulation, deep skepticism about occupational licensing (and other barriers to entry), a firm commitment to religious liberty, and less frequent appeals to patriotism as a substitute for freedom-protecting reforms.

A copy of the "Why I am not a conservative" essay mentioned by Professor Sunstein is here.

The New York Times has a business-page profile of Peter Chernin, Rupert Murdoch's former no. 2 who is now a successful independent movie producer. Toward the bottom comes this:

Ms. Topping and Mr. Chernin declined to reveal the "Exodus" budget. A person with knowledge of the costs, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private information, put the film's budget at $200 million, but said numerous government incentives brought the net production cost to roughly $140 million.

At $60 million, those are some "government incentives"! Mr. Chernin earned $34 million in 2008, his last full year at News Corp., and his severance deal included "use of a corporate jet for 50 hours a year," the Times reported back in 2009.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has a piece in Bloomberg Businessweek in which he comes out as gay. The piece includes the following passage:

The company I am so fortunate to lead has long advocated for human rights and equality for all. We've taken a strong stand in support of a workplace equality bill before Congress, just as we stood for marriage equality in our home state of California. And we spoke up in Arizona when that state's legislature passed a discriminatory bill targeting the gay community. We'll continue to fight for our values, and I believe that any CEO of this incredible company, regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation, would do the same.

Twitter sage Josh Greenman mischievously asks, "If you're celebrating Tim Cook's piece in BusinessWeek, do you acknowledge that corporations have speech rights?"

From my Monday column this week (read the whole thing here at Reason and here at Newsmax) on President Obama's post-election surprises:

A professor of political science at the University of Chicago, Charles Lipson, recently circulated a list of at least six decisions that Obama has postponed making—or at least announcing—until after the election. "As soon as the voting is done," Professor Lipson predicts, "several big shoes will drop," among them Obama's choice of a new attorney general and his decision on the Keystone XL oil pipeline.

A Bloomberg Politics article reports that Senator Ted Cruz's "hard-charging style troubles general election voters. In the Bloomberg Politics/Des Moines Register Iowa Poll earlier this month, Cruz performed worst among potential Republican presidential contenders in a hypothetical matchup with presumed Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton."

The left is starting to stir against the idea that the government can take your stuff. The New York Times had a front page news article on Sunday:

Using a law designed to catch drug traffickers, racketeers and terrorists by tracking their cash, the government has gone after run-of-the-mill business owners and wage earners without so much as an allegation that they have committed serious crimes. The government can take the money without ever filing a criminal complaint, and the owners are left to prove they are innocent. Many give up.

The Washington Post ran a four-part series about what it called "the spread of an aggressive brand of policing that has spurred the seizure of hundreds of millions of dollars in cash from motorists and others not charged with crimes.... Thousands of people have been forced to fight legal battles that can last more than a year to get their money back."

"So far, 2,353 Americans have renounced their citizenship this year, close to the all-time high of 2,369 in the first nine months of 2013," Bloomberg News reports. The third-quarter numbers were particularly high "after rules that make it harder to hide assets from tax authorities came into force."

A new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, "More Recent Evidence on the Effects of Minimum Wages in the United States," concludes, "We see the evidence as still pointing to disemployment effects for low-skilled workers from raising the minimum wage." Further, "we conclude that the best evidence still points to job loss from minimum wages for low-skilled workers — in particular for teens."

The paper is co-authored by David Neumark of the University of California at Irvine, William Wascher of the Federal Reserve, and J.M. Ian Salas of Harvard.

Amid all the obituaries of Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee as the greatest editor since the invention of moveable type, one point I haven't seen mentioned is this: he was not Katharine Graham's top choice for the job of top editor of the Post.

That story is told in God and the Editor: My Search for Meaning at The New York Times, a memoir by Robert H. Phelps that was published in 2009 by Syracuse University Press. Mr. Phelps, who was the Washington news editor for the New York Times from 1965 to 1974, writes:

I have sometimes wondered whether the Post would have covered Watergate as vigorously as it did if Scotty Reston had accepted an offer in 1964 to be its editor. In that year the recently widowed Katharine Graham made a personal appeal to Scotty and his wife Sally:

From a long and horrifying New York Times article about how the Islamic State treated the captured American journalists it later beheaded:

The jihadists had gone from obscurity to running what they called a state.

In areas under their control, they established an intricate bureaucracy, including a tribunal, a police force and even a consumer protection office, which forced kebab stands to close for selling low-quality products.

USA Today invited me to write a brief "opposing view" article responding to their editorial about the minimum wage, and I took them up on the offer. The piece I wrote is here.

A column I wrote back in March gives further background on the issue; it's been shared 8,700 times on Facebook and is the reason the USA Today editors turned to me for this topic.