Amid all the extensive press coverage of GM's decision to recall vehicles because of an ignition problem and take a $300 million charge, there's been little attention paid to the question of what, if anything, the federal officials who were overseeing GM through its taxpayer-funded rescue knew about it. I emailed Steven Rattner to ask what, if anything, he knew and he didn't email back, even just to say no comment. The whole story — company covers up known flaw that causes cars to stall mid-trip, causing fatal crashes — doesn't really match the "Detroit is back" narrative that was a feature of President Obama's re-election campaign.

Libertarian (or classical liberal) law professor Richard Epstein's Hoover Institution column this week is about California's Low Carbon Fuel Standard program, which he says the Supreme Court should strike down under something called the "dormant Commerce Clause": "Situations like this call for some uniform national rule that only Congress can provide."

For more on the state of play on California's Carbon taxes, this Bloomberg News article has an update.

President Obama's habit of endorsing specific companies such as the Gap, Costco, and Aetna is the topic of my column this week, which suggests that the White House is approaching the practice of Queen Elizabeth and her royal warrants. Please check out the column at Reason (here), the New York Sun (here) and Newsmax (here).

Microsoft founder Bill Gates, in a Rolling Stone interview:

The way we help the poor out today [is also a problem]. You have Section 8 housing, food stamps, fuel programs, very complex medical programs. It's all high-overhead, capricious, not well-designed. Its ability to distinguish between somebody who has family that could take care of them versus someone who's really out on their own is not very good, either. It's a totally gameable system – not everybody games it, but lots of people do. Why aren't the technocrats taking the poverty programs, looking at them as a whole, and then redesigning them? Well, they are afraid that if they do, their funding is going to be cut back, so they defend the thing that is absolutely horrific. Just look at low-cost housing and the various forms, the wait lists, things like that.

On energy:

The Washington Post reports about Peter Orszag, who was director of the Office of Management and Budget early in the Obama administration:

New court filings show that the former Obama administration official pulled down $3.1 million in "taxable income" last year at Citigroup. Orszag expects to make nearly $4 million this year, he said in the filing.

Mr. Orszag may want to ask for a raise. He's earning less than a cardiologist at Mount Sinai.

There's a lot to like about Ben Horowitz's new book The Hard Thing About Hard Things.

Mr. Horowitz, raised in Berkeley and the grandchild of card-carrying American Communists, is now a proud Silicon Valley venture capitalist. Notwithstanding all the efforts of Democrats to demonize Mitt Romney and "millionaires and billionaires" during the last election cycle, Mr. Horowitz's book is a welcome sign of an American culture that, for now, at least, is capable of not merely resenting successful entrepreneurs but also of celebrating them.

One of the ideas conveyed clearly in the book is that success is the result not only of luck, but of hard work, a classic puritan virtue. Much of Mr. Horowitz's narrative has to do not with his career as a founding partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, but with his time as CEO of Loudcloud, which became Opsware, and which was sold to Hewlett Packard for $1.6 billion in 2007.

Bloomberg News has a look at the regulatory obstacles the Tesla car company is facing in trying to sell its cars directly to consumers rather than through a network of dealers. New Jersey Governor Christie hasn't been particularly helpful:

Tesla is battling dealers state by state to secure or protect the right to sell its cars directly to consumers. Auto dealers in Ohio, New York, Minnesota, Georgia and elsewhere in the past year have sought to block Tesla from directly retailing its models, arguing that independent retailers are better for shoppers and owners of vehicles. Texas dealers successfully backed a law setting the nation's toughest restrictions on Tesla. Arizona, Colorado and Virginia also imposed limits.

The New Jersey vote shouldn't have been a surprise to Palo Alto, California-based Tesla, said a Christie spokesman.

The federal government spends $1.7 billion a year maintaining empty or underutilized buildings, NPR reports. Exact figures are hard to come by, because the government doesn't even have an accurate list of what it owns:

Some buildings listed as being in great shape had trees growing through the roofs. And many buildings weren't even on the list....

Even when an agency knows it has a building it would like to sell, bureaucratic hurdles limit it from doing so. No federal agency can sell anything unless it's uncontaminated, asbestos-free and environmentally safe. Those are expensive fixes.

Then the agency has to make sure another one doesn't want it. Then state and local governments get a crack at it, then nonprofits — and finally, a 25-year-old law requires the government to see if it could be used as a homeless shelter.

Many agencies just lock the doors and say forget it.

The New York Post's Adam Brodsky has a column explaining New York's affordable housing problem:

New York's affordable-housing programs hurt everyone who isn't lucky enough to get a subsidized apartment, because they take those units off the market. Subsidized tenants have powerful incentives not to relocate — even when, say, they become empty-nesters with rooms to spare.

All that hoarded housing limits the supply available to anyone who's looking, whether kids who just moved to town or growing families. That drives up rents and purchase prices — and makes it nearly impossible to find an affordable place to live.

New York now regulates the rents, directly or indirectly, of some 1.3 million units, more than 60 percent of all rentals and 40 percent of homes. We've built or converted hundreds of thousands of apartments priced at below-market rates. It's wreaked havoc with housing — and yet, we're no closer to satisfying demand.

This graph from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York shows the labor force participation rate.

A Kia automobile now costs $66,400 and an apartment on First Avenue now costs $37.94 million. Meanwhile, Paul Krugman mocks anyone who predicted inflation.

Libertarian (or classical liberal) law professor Richard Epstein's column this week is about property rights:

Private property is the central institution of classical liberal theory. The Constitution contains the explicit guarantee of the Fifth Amendment, which provides: "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." It is easy to discern the theory behind this provision. It compromises between an absolutist libertarian vision of private property that holds that the state can never take it from its owner, even with full compensation, and the totalitarian vision that routinely allows the government to take private property for public use without paying any compensation at all. The just compensation requirement splits the difference, letting the government force the transfer of property, but only upon payment of just compensation. The state thus avoids the holdout problem, without creating the alternative risk of expropriation.

House Republicans are plotting a $1.7 billion tax increase aimed at America's most elite private colleges and universities, my column this week reports. Harvard alone would pay roughly $30 million in tax for a single year in which a $30 billion endowment earned a ten percent return. Yale would pay a $20 million federal tax for a year in which its roughly $20 billion endowment earned a 10 percent return. Please check out the column at the New York Sun here or at Reason here.

The company that results from the merger between banana giants Chiquita and Fyffes will be "domiciled in Ireland for tax purposes," Reuters reports. Earlier recent examples of American companies merging into foreign ones, in part for the tax benefits of avoiding the high U.S. corporate tax rates and rules that tax global profits: Forest Labs, Jim Beam.

The New York Times has a long article detailing the lobbying on both sides, but particularly Bill Ackman's short-selling side, of the battle over Herbalife. Earlier coverage of Herbalife and of Mr. Ackman from this site is here, here, and here.

Not among the three bylines on the Times article is Alison Leigh Cowan, who was described in the book Confidence Game as Mr. Ackman's pipeline into the Times. The Times article reports: