One of the highlights of last night's Alexander Hamilton dinner of the Manhattan Institute was the announcement, by Arthur Laffer, of the Web site savetaxesbymoving.com. Mr. Laffer said he had bought his house in Tennessee with the first year's worth of tax savings he reaped by moving there from California. (The Tiebout Effect in action, yet again.)

The Web site allows users to input their income, age, and number of dependents, along with where they live and where they might move to. It outputs their annual potential tax savings, along with the total tax savings and the compounded growth of them to retirement. It's a nifty site, and Mr. Laffer credited one of the Hamilton award recipients, the chairman of Prescott Investors, Thomas W. Smith, for having written, directed, and produced it.

I'll have a more detailed report on the Alexander Hamilton award dinner shortly.

The governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, is attracting some attention for his commencement address over the weekend at Liberty University, in which he said that "the most significant moment of my life was when I turned it over to Jesus Christ and acknowledged him as my savior."

Excepts are at the Christian Broadcasting Network (here) and at the governor's site (here). At least one left-wing blogger denounced the speech as bigoted and delusional.

Libertarian (or classical liberal) law professor Richard Epstein's column this week takes on French economist Thomas Piketty:

In my academic career, I have devoted much time to examining the rise of the regulatory state and the havoc it wreaks on economic growth. The poor growth rates of the last decade are not the unavoidable consequence of natural events or huge impersonal forces. Many of them stem from our boneheaded choices on regulation and taxation. Simplifying the tax code and easing back on regulations could easily bump that growth rate above Piketty's dire predictions. But so long as policy makers take Piketty's lead, preoccupying themselves with inequality, our prospects for growth are grim.

The argument by Timothy Geithner and the New York Times that the extraordinary measures the government took during the financial crisis were a success because of the "profits" the government made on the troubled asset relief program is the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here).

After the column appeared, an astute reader-watchdog-community member pointed out there's even another way that the Tarp "profits" are bogus: they don't take into account the Federal Reserve's actions buying assets to prop up the value of the assets of the Treasury.

Mitt Romney, in an interview on MSNBC, said, "I part company with many of the conservatives in my party on the issue of the minimum wage. I think we ought to raise it."

This is good confirmation for those of us who had doubts about his free market bona fides back during the presidential campaign. Mr. Romney coming out now, post campaign, in favor of the minimum wage is like Timothy Geithner coming out now, after the Obama presidential campaign, to announce that too big to fail hasn't really been ended, or like Mohamed El-Erian, now that he no longer manages money for Harvard or Pimco, praising Stanford for divesting from coal. It's a "now he tells us."

President Obama is scheduled to attend a fundraiser hosted by the founder of "personal genomics startup 23andme," Anne Wojcicki, the Associated Press reports, noting that the event, "with 30 guests and tickets set at $32,400," could raise "nearly $1 million" for the Democratic National Committee.

Nowhere in the AP story, or in Mike Allen's Politico Playbook, which picked up the AP story this morning, is there any mention of the background that 23andMe recently had to stop providing its DNA test customers with health information after the Food and Drug Administration told it to stop. Ms. Wojcicki said in a company blog post on December 5, 2013 that her company "is committed to finding the right regulatory path for our customers" and that "our goal is to work cooperatively with the FDA."

Mohamed El-Erian, who did not divest from coal when he was in charge of Harvard's endowment or when he was co-chief investment officer of Pimco, now applauds Stanford for announcing it will divest from coal companies: "this small but notable step provides an approach that others can emulate."

It's the sort of thing that Mr. El-Erian's editor at Bloomberg View, Mark Whitehouse, might have wanted to ask him to address in the article: "If this approach by Stanford is such a great idea, why didn't you do it yourself when you were managing billions of dollars?"

In 2013, $4.5 million in Massachusetts welfare benefits were spent in Florida, CBS News reports.

A Massachusetts State representative, Shauna O'Connell, has been trying to get a law passed limiting the use of the welfare EBT benefits cards to Massachusetts and neighboring states, but she hasn't succeeded:

"It's not just Florida," she said. "It's in Hawaii, California, Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, that people are spending their taxpayer EBT money."

CBS reports:

Since October of last year, DTA [the state's "Department of Transitional Assistance"] has shut down the EBT accounts of 3,457 people who the agency determined were actually living out-of-state and collecting Massachusetts benefits. 871 of those cases were in Florida.

"Houston had more new-home starts last year than the entire state of California," the Money Illusion blog reports. The American Enterprise Institute's Mark Perry, meanwhile, reports:

The cost of a one-way U-Haul truck leaving California for Texas is more than twice the cost to rent that same truck going from Texas to California, suggesting that there are twice as many trucks and people leaving California for Texas than vice-versa. Based on the huge difference in demand for one-way truck rentals, there is a premium of more than 100% for Californians to rent trucks going to Texas, and large discounts for trucks going in the opposite direction to California. U-Haul's market-based pricing seems to confirm the California exodus to Texas of jobs, people and businesses like Toyota and Occidental.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston is laying off 160 employees, nearly 15 percent of its 1,075-person workforce, the Boston Globe reports.

In earlier posts (here and here) we raised the prospect that increases in the minimum wage would accelerate the trend of replacing human workers with software and machines: "raise the minimum wage high enough, and you'll be the one punching in that order yourself at the Dunkin' Donuts or McDonald's drive-through or counter."

Now Bloomberg reports, under the headline "More Kiosks, Fewer Cashiers Coming Soon to Panera": "Panera's rolling out a new store design where customers order on their phones or at kiosks. ...The average restaurant will have about eight kiosks and one to two fewer registers."

Millions of American read Vermont Royster's words each year at Christmas and Thanksgiving when the Wall Street Journal reprints his editorials, "In Hoc Anno Domini," "The Desolate Wilderness," and, "And the Fair Land."

As for the person behind those editorials, he's more of a cipher. Chris Roush's new biography, Thinking Things Over: Vermont Royster's Legacy at The Wall Street Journal, pulls back the curtain and, at its best, gives a glimpse of what it was like to be a powerful editor or a star columnist when the Journal was flush with money and influence.

Mr. Roush reports that The Journal "sent a limousine to the hotel to pick up the Roysters and the granddaughters and take them to the dock, where they boarded the Queen Elizabeth II for a five-day trip in first-class cabins." When Royster, who served as a naval officer in World War II, wasn't traveling first class aboard the QE II, he enjoyed cruising the Atlantic Coast in a 50-foot Grand Banks yacht.

New York magazine's Jonathan Chait had the same reaction I did to that New York Times article about the Walton Foundation's charter school efforts. "Insanely hostile," he calls it. And Mr. Chait is a liberal.

From libertarian (or classical liberal) law professor Richard Epstein's column on French economist Thomas Piketty:

To James Madison, the great concern with democratic (as opposed to republican) forms of government was that voters with more influence in the political arena could satisfy, as it is put in Federalist 10, "a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project."...The place of large concentrations of capital in a democratic society is deeply vulnerable to majoritarian politics, as evidenced by the strongly progressive income tax rates and estate tax rates. In other words, the great wealth of the few makes them politically vulnerable, not politically unstoppable. In a political climate that treats as a major political objective the rectification of inequalities of fortune, the net transfers in the United States are not to, but from, the financial elites.

The Washington Post reports:

IRD has received more grants and cooperative agreements from USAID in recent years than any other nonprofit relief and development organization in the nation — $1.9 billion.

Along the way, the nonprofit rewarded its employees with generous salaries and millions in bonuses. Among the beneficiaries: the minister, Arthur B. Keys, and his wife, Jasna Basaric-Keys, who together earned $4.4 million in salary and bonuses between 2008 and 2012....The nonprofit organization, in turn, has hired at least 19 employees from USAID, the lead government agency for addressing poverty and supporting democracy worldwide. Several of them came directly from their desks at the agency to occupy important posts at the company.