The tensions within the Republican Party are the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here).

Alvin Rabushka sounds a warning about the future of relations between Stanford University and the affiliated Hoover Institution: He predicts that Hoover "will exist as an independent institution within the frame of SU in name only for fund-raising from conservative donors, but will lose its independence in appointments, programs, and expenditures...The next director will likely complete the assimilation, transferring four buildings (including a new one to open in 2017), an endowment nearing a billion dollars when pledged legacies are received, half-time relief from teaching duties for dozens of Stanford faculty with little interest in [conservative] policy research..."

The economic journalist David Warsh, in a recent column assessing a book in which leading economists make predictions about the next 100 years, concluded:

"Four Easy Ways To Boost the Economy" is the headline over Diana Furchtgott-Roth's Marketwatch column, which proposes to fix ObamaCare, immigration, and taxes and to allow exports of natural gas. Fine ideas all, but none, alas, is "easy," at least as a practical political matter, or else they would have already been done.

"Americans' spending on health care spiked by 9.9 percent in the first quarter of 2014, new federal data shows. That data could be revised, or it could be a blip, but it adds to the evidence that health-care costs are back on the march — which is very, very bad news for the federal budget." — So reports Vox, casting some doubt on the Peter Orszag claim that the enrollment of people into ObamaCare health insurance would "bend the curve" downward on health care costs. It turns out that people who newly have health insurance that they (and in some cases, the rest of the taxpayers) are paying for actually use that insurance, and that, contrary to the claims, that usage isn't all that much cheaper than the occasional use of emergency rooms by uninsured patients.

Assume that Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling is indeed a racist rather than, or at least in addition to, being the victim of a set-up by someone trying to embarrass him. Is the decision by National Basketball Association commissioner Adam Silver to impose a lifetime ban on Mr. Sterling — he "may not attend any NBA games or practices, be present at any Clippers office or facility, or participate in any business or player personnel decisions involving the team" — a wise or just one?

The question got me thinking about some other racists in history.

There was Abraham Lincoln, who, in the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858, said:

The New York Times has a look at the revolving door between the Justice Department, financial regulatory agencies, and private law firms:

many firms, flush with business from banks and corporations caught in one legal problem after another, are now clamoring for the former prosecutors to handle such specialized work and navigate an overlapping maze of government agencies....Robert S. Khuzami, the former head of enforcement at the S.E.C., is receiving more than $5 million a year at Kirkland & Ellis, while David Meister, the onetime C.F.T.C. official, is earning a few million dollars annually as head of the white-collar group in Skadden's New York office.

A front-page New York Times attack on the Walton Family Foundation's support for charter schools and school vouchers is the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at Reason (here), the New York Sun (here), or at Newsmax (here).

It's also interesting in the context of Amanda Gordon's report for Bloomberg News on the Success Academy Charter Schools benefit featuring Jeb Bush, Daniel Loeb, and Laura Blankfein.

With the Pfizer-AstraZenica merger-acquisition deal pretty much uniformly being interpreted as a way for Pfizer to reduce the tax it would otherwise owe on its accumulated overseas profits, the question is whether Congress will get the message and reduce American corporate taxes, or whether it is going to sit by and watch as more and more American companies disappear via deals with companies based in places with lower tax rates. (And it's not just the rate but whether the profits are taxed worldwide or just in the territory where they are earned).

Bloomberg has a nifty graphic listing the "top U.S. companies by accumulated offshore profits." Pfizer is third on the list, after GE and Microsoft and just above Merck, Apple, and IBM. If Pfizer doesn't get Congress's attention, what is it going to take? GE, Microsoft, Apple, or IBM doing a deal like this?

Bloomberg News has a long article about how President Obama's long delays in the Keystone XL pipeline to bring oil from Canada has strained and damaged U.S.-Canada relations. One angle in the piece that struck me as undercovered elsewhere is the role of the Republican governor of Nebraska, Dave Heineman, in scuttling the project:

For Obama, the political calculus of Nebraska was indirect yet important. The national campaign had little interest in the state's five electoral votes, Bob Kerrey, the Democratic Senate candidate, recounted. Yet with a Republican governor opposed, it raised the pain point with environmentalists for the president to say yes.

The French economist Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the Twenty-First Century is taking some more sharp hits.

Diana Furchtgott-Roth writes:

he cannot even offer an accurate historic description of the U.S. minimum wage.

Piketty states, "From 1980 to 1990, under the presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, the federal minimum wage remained stuck at $3.25, which led to a significant decrease in purchasing power when inflation is factored in. It then rose to $5.25 under Bill Clinton in the 1990s and was frozen at that level under George W. Bush before being increased several times by Barack Obama after 2008." (page 309).

The well publicized death earlier this week of the boxer Hurricane Carter, who served 19 years in prison before the triple murder charges on which he had been wrongfully convicted were dismissed, got me thinking about Michael Steinberg.

Steinberg is the fund manager at SAC Capital Advisers LP, part of the Connecticut hedge fund led by Steven A. Cohen, who was convicted in December after a prosecution led by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara. This site covered our doubts about the conviction and the prosecution in an earlier post here.

Paul Kupiec writes on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page:

The average compensation at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) exceeded $190,000 in 2012. The staff at the Federal Reserve is likely even better compensated, but the Fed refuses to release employee salaries.

The latest innovation in left-wing political economics is legislation that would raise the minimum wage in New York State to $15 an hour — but only for a select group of employers unlucky enough to be targeted by politicians. The bill's champion is advertising for three-day-a-week unpaid interns. It's all the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here).

Brandeis University's decision to revoke its invitation to give Ayaan Hirsi Ali an honorary degree is the subject of my column this week. Please check it out at Reason (here) and Newsmax (here).