This weekend, Warren Buffett released his annual letter as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. There are some points worth mentioning about it beyond the ones I made last week in my column about an advance excerpt from the letter. They support the idea of Mr. Buffett as an impressive capitalist but one who is also not without his flaws.

Mr. Buffett writes, "We completed two large acquisitions, spending almost $18 billion to purchase all of NV Energy and a major interest in H.J. Heinz. Both companies fit us well and will be prospering a century from now." He also writes, "A century hence, BNSF and MidAmerican Energy will still be playing major roles in our economy."

Furniture company Ikea and supermarket company ICA are getting into the banking business in Sweden and taking market share away from the largest banks there, Bloomberg News reports.

The Bloomberg article suggests that may be because the biggest banks are hampered by "some of the world's strictest capital rules." But competition is itself a kind of regulation. If customers are fed up by the complexity or high fees or bad service of large banks, it creates a market opportunity for other firms to deliver banking services that customers will like better.

A professor at George Washington University School of Law, Jonathan Turley, who says he voted for President Obama and agrees with him on a lot of issues, is faulting Mr. Obama for taking the law into his own hands. From an interview Professor Turley gave to NPR's Here & Now:

I'm afraid I think he is violating the Constitution...the most serious violations, in my view, are various cases when he went to Congress, as in the immigration field, as in the healthcare field, as for very specific things, and was rejected, and then decided just to order those on his own. He's also been accused of shifting large amounts of money from their appointed or appropriated purpose to other purposes. ...what we're seeing with the Obama administration is really a systemic circumvention of Congress.

New York is looking to join Texas as a state where auto dealers get the legislature to prevent automaker Tesla from selling cars directly to consumers. Matthew Yglesias at Slate has a short item poking fun at this, a classic example of business joining with politicians to make regulations that hurt consumers.

The chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Dave Camp, is trying to cut taxes and simplify the tax code, so I hesitate to be too dismissive of the tax reform plan he unveiled this week. But that said, I can't really help the feeling that what it amounts to is pretty disappointing — especially coming from the House Republicans, who are supposed to be the Tea Party, pro-growth representatives in Washington.

Americans for Tax Reform, Grover Norquist's group, said, "the Camp draft would severely hamstring capital investment, unnecessarily damaging potential economic growth over the long run." ATR said, "Today, the top marginal income tax rate on capital gains and dividends is 23.8 percent. Under the Camp draft, this rises to 24.8 percent." For this, we need Republicans? To raise the already high tax rates on savings and investment?

Steven Cohen's SAC Capital will hire a "chief surveillance officer to monitor trading," the New York Times reports: "A person briefed on the matter said the firm intended to hire either a former federal prosecutor or a securities regulator for the new surveillance monitoring position."

Libertarian (or classical liberal) law professor Richard Epstein's column this week is about the minimum wage:

Nor is the case for a higher minimum wage advanced by insisting, as the White House does, that "paying workers more can also improve motivation, morale, focus, and health, all of which can make workers more productive." Indeed, these considerations cut exactly the opposite way. If increased wages alone increased productivity, there would be no need for federal intervention: Employers would have all the incentive they need to raise wages voluntarily. That is how markets work.

President Obama is pushing for an increase in the minimum wage, and some states are also considering increases. My guess is House Republicans will block it, but if they cave it will be good for the companies that make robots and also touch-screen self-checkout computers. 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.

There's more to say about this, and I plan to come back to it again soon at greater length, but in the meantime here is Daniel Mitchell's column, complete with cartoons.

And here is Bryan Caplan debunking Peter Thiel's suggestion that a higher minimum wage might make sense to counter the incentives of excessively generous welfare benefits. Mr. Caplan writes:

Warren Buffett's boasting about his real estate investments is the topic of my latest column. The properties were bought from the government, which sold them at prices so low that Mr. Buffett is in ecstasy. Please check the column out at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), or Newsmax (here).

WhatsApp co-founder and CEO Jan Koum reportedly signed the $19 billion deal in which his company was acquired by Facebook in a place that had some symbolic significance to him — where he once stood on line for food stamps.

Perhaps the supposed decline in social mobility in America has been overstated?

Men's Journal has a profile of hedge-fund-manager-turned-climate-change-activist Tom Steyer, who reportedly plans to spend "as much as $100 million" during the 2014 election cycle on political activities focused on countering climate change:

Steyer is teaming up with his old Goldman Sachs pals, Hank Paulson and Robert Rubin, along with Mayor Michael Bloomberg, to finance a study on the costs of inaction in climate change. ...

Already, his closest associates are speculating about what high office Steyer might be suitable for if, for instance, he is tapped by a future president Hillary Clinton in 2016. Treasury secretary? Secretary of energy?

Says his brother Hume, "If she does win, she might give him a job. And if she offered him a job, he might take it."

Barring that, he could run for office in California...

At the Tax Foundation's blog, William McBride has the tax angle on the $25 billion acquisition of Forest Labs by Actavis, which last year moved to Ireland from New Jersey: "The new company will be based in Ireland, where the corporate tax rate is 12.5 percent – much lower than the combined U.S. federal and state corporate tax rate of 40 percent or more in New York and New Jersey."

From the New York Times: "In this case, Forest's earnings, which had been getting taxed at a higher United States rate, will eventually be taxed at the lower Irish rate currently paid by Actavis, which executives estimated to be 16 percent. Tax savings will amount to at least $100 million, the companies said."

The New York Times has a pretty good account of how the Jones Act is delaying the arrival of road salt to New Jersey for use on the state's icy roads:

State officials said they arranged on Feb. 7 to buy the salt and ship it immediately to Port Newark on a vessel that had just unloaded its cargo in Maine and would have delivered the entire load to New Jersey by last weekend.

But then officials learned that the maritime law, which was passed in 1920 and is known as the Jones Act, stipulates that only ships with United States flags and crews can transport goods between American ports. They applied for the waiver on Thursday, but the Department of Homeland Security has not yet ruled on it.

Jeb Bush's strengths and weaknesses as a presidential candidate in 2016 are the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at the New York Sun here.

Libertarian (or classical liberal) law professor Richard Epstein's column this week is about public-sector unions and their pensions:

San Jose and other local governments could be on the brink of bankruptcy. The unions are playing a reckless game. If they don't back off, they may dig the bankruptcy hole deep enough that their fully accrued benefits could easily be put in jeopardy as well.