If you are learning from what you read at FutureOfCapitalism and want to send an encouraging signal of support, please consider becoming a paying subscriber. Your paid subscription helps make everything here possible and will allow us to keep growing, expanding, and improving. An entry-level subscription is less than $1 a week, and the transaction won't take much of your time at all. The link is here. Thank you.

Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen offers a recipe for creating more Silicon Valleys:

policymakers shouldn't be trying to copy Silicon Valley. Instead, they should be figuring out what domain is (or could be) specific to their region — and then removing the regulatory hurdles for that particular domain. ... Imagine a Bitcoin Valley, for instance, where some country fully legalizes cryptocurrencies for all financial functions. Or a Drone Valley, where a particular region removes all legal barriers to flying unmanned aerial vehicles locally. A Driverless Car Valley in a city that allows experimentation with different autonomous car designs, redesigned roadways and safety laws. A Stem Cell Valley. And so on.
...Rethinking the regulatory barriers in specific industries would better draw the startups, researchers and divisions of big companies that want to innovate in the vanguard of a particular domain...

A new American embassy compound in Mexico City to be designed by Tod William Billie Tsien Architects and Davis Body Bond will cost $763.5 million, 38 percent more than initially estimated, Roll Call reports. I'm all for good architecture, but this seems rather extravagant, no?

It's not just Virginia cracking down on ride-sharing services Uber and Lyft. The Boston Globe reports from Cambridge, Mass.:

Some Uber supporters contend that city's proposed regulations are not part of some larger debate over the quality of life in Cambridge, but rather more simply an effort to protect a single business interest: the taxi industry.

"There clearly is a faction in the Cambridge city government who is opposed to Uber and trying to protect the entrenched taxi incumbents," said Joel Fleming, who first came to Cambridge to attend Harvard University and decided to stay because of its progressive and liberal nature.

Fleming was so incensed by the city's proposal that he joined an angry crowd of Uber users and supporters who crowded into a small basement meeting room at a municipal building Tuesday night where the License Commission held its hearing.

Bill Clinton's labor secretary, Robert Reich, notices two recent comments by financial industry figures about income inequality:

Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, warned recently on "CBS This Morning" that income inequality is "destablilizing" the nation and is "responsible for the divisions in the country." He went on to say that "too much of the GDP over the last generation has gone to too few of the people." ...Bill Gross, Chairman of Pimco, the largest bond-trading firm in the world, said this week that America needs policies that bring labor and capital back into balance, including a higher minimum wage and higher taxes on the rich.

A Republican Senator from Tennessee, Bob Corker, has come out in favor of increasing the federal gasoline tax to 30.4 cents a gallon from 18.4 cents, and indexing it to inflation thereafter. The Tax Foundation passes along the claim that this "would not raise taxes overall; they plan to offset the increased revenues with tax cuts elsewhere – possibly by making permanent some of the 'tax extenders' – temporary provisions that face expiration from year to year."

My two reactions were:

1. For this we need Republicans?

2. Notice that the offsetting tax cuts are described as a "plan" or "possibly," while the tax increase is specific and precise.

Via Arnold Kling and Tyler Cowen and the Web site vice.com comes warning of what Mr. Kling calls "really, really not a good idea" and what I would go even further and call a really bad idea: occupational licensing requirements for software engineers. From the Vice article:

Frailey suggests that software engineers should be required to demonstrate a certain level of expertise before offering their services to the public, just like professionals in disciplines like medicine and law.

"Anybody can claim to be a heart surgeon but how do you know whether they're any good?" Frailey said. "You start by saying, 'Do you have a medical license?'"

Bloomberg News has an update on the performance of Harvard's endowment, tied to the recent news of the exits of three senior money managers:

Harvard's endowment posted annual average gains of 1.7 percent in the past five years, according to data compiled by Charles Skorina & Co. That compares with annual returns of 6.8 percent at Columbia University, 5.4 percent at University of Pennsylvania and 3.3 percent at Yale University.

The Bloomberg article doesn't say whether those returns are after the costs of paying the money managers, but my impression is that usually that's how such returns are stated. The Bloomberg also doesn't say how much more money Harvard would have if the $32.7 billion endowment had posted better returns, or whether the Columbia, Penn, or Yale endowments accepted greater risk or less liquidity to achieve the higher returns.

Libertarian (or classical liberal) law professor Richard Epstein's column this week is about that California case, Vergara v. California Teacher's Association, in which Judge Rolf Treu struck down public school teacher tenure and the seniority system as violations of the California state constitution. Professor Epstein writes: "The question then arises of whether this decisive attack on union dominance amounts to a form of unprincipled judicial activism."

That was my question, too. Professor Epstein concludes: "The difficulty with Judge Treu, then, is that he did not go far enough. Don't just stop with the most invidious provisions of union contracts, but instead knock out the entire system of state collective bargaining and branch."

From Michael Greenberg, in response to the post here about how the movement to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour is spreading nationwide:

Let's use the Cloward-Piven strategy of "overloading the system" on these progressives. We should unequivocally support raising the minimum wage throughout the entire country. This will, of course, lead to economic turmoil and disaster after which a desperate population will vote in Republicans to fix things up.

Bloomberg News' Richard Rubin catches Bill and Hillary Clinton sticking their Westchester house into a "qualified personal residence trust" on the advice of estate-planning advisers Linda Hirschson of Greenberg Traurig and Rorrie Gregorio of Marcum LLP. The news article begins, "Bill and Hillary Clinton have long supported an estate tax to prevent the U.S. from being dominated by inherited wealth. That doesn't mean they want to pay it."

Shades of Warren Buffett.

Sanctuary, the magazine of the Massachusetts Audubon Society that attracted criticism here a couple of years ago for an article praising V.I. Lenin for what the magazine called his "strong commitment to conserving Russia's natural heritage," is ceasing publication after 34 years and 200 issues, the society announced.

Mass. Audubon says the award-winning magazine's editor and staff will instead work on an "annual book." The final issue of the magazine is devoted to "climate change."

In a tweet, Mass Audubon offered the explanation that "Rising paper, printing, & postage costs are making it difficult for us to invest in print publications as much as we would like."

The fight between Ramesh Ponnuru (of the American Enterprise Institute, National Review, and Bloomberg View) and Kim Strassel (of the Wall Street Journal) over tax policy is the topic of my column this week:

One might aspire for the debate to be conducted with more civility. If there is a bright side here, though, it is that Republicans are arguing over how to cut taxes rather than how to raise them. Already heated, this fight is going to get even livelier in the next two years.

Please check out the full column at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here).

Peter Boettke writes at the Coordination Problem blog:

The public (and politicians) often talk about public policy as if all that matters is intentions, but to the economists the question is never really one of intentions, but of incentives. When policies achieve their intended outcome it is because incentives were aligned correctly, when they fail to achieve those intended outcomes it is because incentives were not aligned appropriately for that purpose. ...

Arnold Kling writes sardonically about the scandal at the Veterans Administration:

I guess the idea of selling the VA facilities to the private sector and instead giving veterans money to shop around for the best available health care is just too silly to consider.