Nobel laureate Paul Krugman is attacking Amity Shlaes as a paranoid "crank" for her latest column about inflation, which is pretty much what you'd expect from Professor Krugman, who, by the way works for a newspaper whose weekday single copy New York City cover price has increased to $2.50 from the 60 cents that it cost in 1999, or 417%.

The Tax Foundation's blog criticizes New Jersey Governor Chris Christie for a $260 million tax credit for a Holtec nuclear energy manufacturing facility in Camden: "Instead of carving up the tax base by choosing winners and losers for political expediency, New Jersey should implement broad based reforms to its tax code to create a neutral environment for business development."

The Treasury secretary, Jacob Lew, has sent the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Dave Camp, a letter calling on Congress to act to outlaw "inversions" under which American companies merge with overseas companies to avoid American taxes:

Congress should enact legislation immediately — and make it retroactive to May 2014 — to shut down this abuse of our tax system.

What we need as a nation is a new sense of economic patriotism, where we all rise or fall together...We should not be providing support for corporations that seek to shift their profits overseas to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.

The New York Times has a front-page news article today about the fact that Herbert Pardes had $5.6 million in total compensation for 2012 as "executive vice chairman" of the board of trustees of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. The article quotes Princeton University health care economist Uwe Reinhardt:

they said that in the context of a $3.7 billion organization, Dr. Pardes's salary would not affect the bottom line.

"There might be other reasons why one might call this a problem," Dr. Reinhardt said. "Obviously, social envy is one of them."

Zephyr Teachout, a Fordham law professor who is planning to run against Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary for governor of New York, gives an interview to Instapundit Glenn Harlan Reynolds for Professor Reynolds' USA Today column.

Professor Teachout rails against "concentrated private power" but dodges a question about public employee unions, which in New York city and state politics are a formidable power, perhaps even the formidable power.

The Justice Department's settlement with Citigroup requires the bank to hire, as a monitor, a former Justice Department lawyer, Thomas Perrelli, Overlawyered.com notes. There's something a bit odd about the regulator requiring the hiring of a former regulator as part of a settlement agreement, no? I understand it happens all the time, and Mr. Perrelli, who clerked for the estimable Royce Lamberth and was associate attorney general under Eric Holder, seems like a fine fellow. But who knows what his fees will be? Shouldn't Citi shareholders be able to shop around for compliance personnel rather than having a pick pressed upon them by the Justice Department? In any event, the presence of former high-ranking administration officials (that's you, Robert Rubin) didn't prevent Citi from getting into trouble the last time around, so there's little indication that having Mr. Perrelli will prevent another problem down the road.

The federal guilty plea by the former CEO of Calpers, Fred Buenrostro, who says he accepted $200,000 in cash bribes in paper bags and a shoebox to help win a $3 billion investment by Calpers in private equity funds, is the subject of my column this week, about the state-pension-fund-industrial complex. Please check it out at Reason (here), the New York Sun (here), and Newsmax (here).

Venture capitalist Tim Draper's plan to split California into six states may make the state's ballot in 2016, USA Today reports.

The USA Today article doesn't explain what federal action, if any, would be needed to admit the new six states to the union, or what the chances of such action would be. But it is intriguing.

The Hoover Institution has taken the collection of brief articles from Wall Street Journal editorial page contributors on how to renew American prosperity and self confidence that the Journal published for its 125th anniversary and placed it on the Web here outside the Journal's paywall. My main reactions were that there was a surprising lack of consensus or common themes, though I suppose tax reform, reducing regulation on business, and something to improve education were three that got repeated mentions.

The American Spectator has taken my cover story from the July-August issue of the magazine, about Senator Elizabeth Warren, out from behind its paywall. You can enjoy it here.

The American Enterprise Institute's James Pethokoukis notices that Canada, as a measure to help young families, has unilaterally eliminated its tariff on imported baby clothes. He suggests that America do the same and eliminate our tariff on imported baby clothes, which is imposed at an overall average rate of 10.8 percent of the price of the goods. Sounds good, but why stop there? Why not eliminate tariffs on all imported clothing, or on imports altogether, rather than picking one group (young families) to favor over others?

Walmart's increasingly dominant market-share in the check-cashing business is the subject of a fascinating story in the Boston Globe:

Walmart charges $3 to cash a check of up to $1,000, compared with as much as $25 at other check-cashing services and the $7 that many banks charge people who don't have accounts with them....

Eugene Campbell, 36, a freight worker from East Providence, recently stopped by customer services in the Walmart in Walpole to cash a paycheck from one of his two jobs. Campbell, the father of four, said that after being hit by a series of fees that snowballed into $700 during one month, he decided to leave his bank and get rid of most of his bank accounts.

"It's cheaper than anything out there and there are no overdraft fees," he said of Walmart. "I've never had a problem."

The New York Times reports on a jury's acquittal of Rengan Rajaratnam in an insider trading case brought by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara: "The case also underscored a broader whiff of skepticism about the crackdown on insider trading, as a federal appeals court in Manhattan weighs whether to toss out two other recent convictions."

More:

"They took their time and they had this evidence years ago," said Richard J. Holwell, a lawyer in private practice and the former federal judge who presided over the criminal trial of Mr. Rajaratnam's brother, whom he sentenced to 11 years in prison. "You can say that the government in the final analysis overreached, and that's what the jury is for."

Government lawyers who go to work for colleges as Title IX compliance officers are the subject of my column this week. Please check it out at the New York Sun (here) and Reason (here).

Here are three pieces — all of them, in my view, terrific — calling for more immigration to America:

•Gordon Crovitz's wondeful column in the Wall Street Journal marking the 30-year anniversary of the Journal's editorial proposing a five word constitutional amendment: "There shall be open borders."

•The "Grumpy Economist," John Cochrane of the University of Chicago, asserting that the "optimal number" of immigrants to America is "two billion, two million, fifty-two thousand and thirty-five (2,002,052,035). Seriously":

The United States is made up of three and a half million square miles, with 84 people per square mile. The United Kingdom has 650 people per square mile. If we let in two billion people, we'll have no more population density than the UK.