A trade mission to the United Arab Emirates by the governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick, is the subject of an op-ed piece by me in today's Boston Herald. Check it out online here.

The "revolving door" between government and the private sector isn't limited to the SEC or the Justice Department. Here are two other recent examples in the news:

Stanford University has hired Catherine Criswell, a 19-year veteran of the Office of Civil Rights at the federal Department of Education, to serve as its new "Title IX Coordinator," a job that the university says involves overseeing and tracking "the university's investigations of incidents alleged to violate" Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.

And Aerojet Rocketdyne, a supplier of rocket engines used by the Defense Department, has hired Roger "Scott" Correll as "vice president for government acquisition and policy." The National Legal and Policy Center reports: "From March 2011 to January of this year [Mr. Correll] was the official at the Pentagon responsible for procuring launch services from private companies."

From a New York Times obituary of Prince Rupert zu Loewenstein, the money manager for the Rolling Stones rock band:

He successfully urged them to leave England, initially for the south of France, to escape high taxes. ...

Prince Loewenstein did business with a skein of companies in the Netherlands to reduce taxes. The Stones rehearsed in Canada, not the United States, for the same reason.

Add the Rolling Stones to the list of rock stars who, like Bono, structure their business affairs to be taxed in countries with low tax rates. Talent, like capital, is mobile, and it will go where it is well treated.

Further on the theme explored in my column this week on restaurant robots, Nobel laureate economist Michael Spence writes:

the impact of robotics (another technology with digital foundations), is not confined to production. Though self-driving cars and drones are the most attention-getting examples, the impact on logistics is no less transformative. Computers and robotic cranes that schedule and move containers around and load ships now control the Port of Singapore, one of the most efficient in the world.

It's not only McDonald's order-takers and cashiers that may have their jobs replaced by computers, in other words: taxi-drivers and longshoremen may be next.

A professor at Georgetown University Law Center, Adam J. Levitin, has a 78-page review essay in the Harvard Law Review under the headline "The Politics of Financial Regulation and the Regulation of Financial Politics." It reviews a series of books about the financial crisis, including the ones by Sheila Bair and Neil Barofsky, passing along some of their juiciest details and pondering how to prevent financial regulators from being "captured" by the institutions they regulate.

It's a long article and I don't agree with it entirely, but I though it was worth my time. I particularly appreciated the parts about how "The United States continues to have one of the most politically insulated financial regulatory systems in the developed world...American financial regulation and monetary policy has moved from being the province of electoral politics in the nineteenth century to now being the preserve of technocratic New Deal-era independent agencies."

The construction of a new headquarters in Washington for the Department of Homeland Security "is running more than $1.5 billion over budget, is 11 years behind schedule and may never be completed," the Washington Post reports.

"The budget has ballooned to $4.5 billion, with completion pushed back to 2026," says a news article in the Post, which describes the project as "a monumental example of Washington inefficiency and drift."

"ER Visits Rise Despite Law" is the headline on a Wall Street Journal news article that begins, "Early evidence suggests that emergency rooms have become busier since the Affordable Care Act expanded insurance coverage this year, despite the law's goal of reducing unnecessary care in ERs."

An astute reader-participant-community member-content-co-creator-watchdog asks whether the word "because of" would be a better fit than "despite" in the headline, as newly insured patients head to the emergency room for medical situations that they would have treated on their own before they had insurance. The Journal article gets into these issues some.

One of the underappreciated facts about regulation is that it's often the big companies that want the regulation, in part as a way to protect themselves against competitors. That's the context in which to see the news that, as the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports:

Sabra, the popular U.S. hummus company, petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to create a standard for which dips are considered hummus.

Sabra would like hummus to be defined as "the semisolid food prepared from mixing cooked, dehydrated, or dried chickpeas and tahini with one or more optional ingredients," according to a news release Monday.

Sabra's 11-page proposed standards would require products called hummus to be predominantly made of chickpeas, with no more than 5 percent tahini.

Megan McArdle has a couple of pieces up at Bloomberg View that were worth my time. One asks whether, under a wealth tax along the lines proposed by the French economist Thomas Piketty, professorial tenure should be taxed. It is, after all, she argues, a valuable asset. The other runs under the headline, "Green Cars Won't Save the Planet."

Glenn Harlan Reynolds has a USA Today column enumerating the various ways that American higher education is becoming a joke. The hypersensitivity — a kind of intolerance in its own right — is getting to be too much even for some academics, which is an encouraging development. Professor Reynolds teaches law at the University of Tennessee.

The rise of self-order touchpad kiosks in restaurants as a response to labor regulations including a minimum wage and a mandate to supply health insurance for employees is the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here).

Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. is getting a "deeply discounted" two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan from NYU, the New York Post reports:

Gates admitted to the The Post that he has long received his pricey housing perk even though he has never held a job at NYU. Instead, Gates said he has an informal "consultancy" with Sexton that is ungoverned by a written contract.

In addition to advising Sexton's administration on affirmative action and minority faculty hiring, the African-American studies luminary said he has given three or four free talks at NYU over the years.

Gates also suggested that Sexton bestowed the apartment on him as part of an unconventional — and thus far unsuccessful — courting ritual that has dragged on for more than a decade.

"It isn't exactly a secret that President Sexton would very much like to recruit me to the NYU faculty," Gates said.

Lawrence Summers has a pretty interesting review of Thomas Piketty's book. Professor Summers writes:

Even where capital accumulation is concerned, I am not sure that Piketty's theory emphasizes the right aspects. Looking to the future, my guess is that the main story connecting capital accumulation and inequality will not be Piketty's tale of amassing fortunes. It will be the devastating consequences of robots, 3-D printing, artificial intelligence, and the like for those who perform routine tasks. Already there are more American men on disability insurance than doing production work in manufacturing. And the trends are all in the wrong direction, particularly for the less skilled, as the capacity of capital embodying artificial intelligence to replace white-collar as well as blue-collar work will increase rapidly in the years ahead.

And this:

McDonald's in Europe is installing 7,000 kiosks that will allow customers to place their own orders without the assistance of a human cashier, CNET reports. Our earlier coverage of restaurant self-order kiosks is here.

The Manhattan Institute has posted the video of Monday night's Alexander Hamilton dinner, which featured, among others, Paul Ryan and Jeb Bush. A surprise guest was Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was greeted with a standing ovation when she was introduced from the podium by the Manhattan Institute's chairman.

You can watch for yourself if you are interested, but I was there and had some impressions: