The comment on the day, submitted by Harrison O'Toole, is on immigrant-owned businesses:

where I live, virtually the entire range of lawn-mowing and house-painting businesses are owned by Hispanic immigrants. And I don't live anywhere near the border with Mexico. Far from it. The business owners and employers are, in my experience, in these two businesses, from El Salvador. The best Indian restaurant in this area is run by an Indian immigrant whose daughter graduated from Duke. That restaurant employs at least 25 people.

The top enforcement official at the Commodities and Futures Trading Commission, David Meister, is leaving to join Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom, the New York Times reports:

after spending nearly three years as a federal regulator, Mr. Meister is returning to his defense lawyer past.

Mr. Meister, who left Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom to run the enforcement unit of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, is rejoining the law firm as a partner in New York.

His arrival next month will prompt a modest reshuffling at Skadden. Mr. Meister, who left the C.F.T.C. in October, will lead the white-collar group in Skadden's New York office, taking over for David M. Zornow, who founded the group in 1989.

"His experience on the government side is going to be incredibly valuable to our clients," said Mr. Zornow, who will remain global head of Skadden's litigation practice.

The former chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., Sheila Bair, has reportedly joined the board of directors of Banco Santander, SA.

And 3D Systems, a 3-D printing company, has reportedly named Neal Orringer, a former senior adviser to the secretary of commerce on manufacturing policy and director of manufacturing at the Pentagon, as its new vice president for alliances and partnerships.

Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, makes the zero-sum argument that, as the subheadline of his USA Today article puts it "newcomers cost Americans millions of jobs."

Mr. Sessions argues that immigrants compete with native-born Americans looking for jobs. He doesn't seem to realize that immigrants start companies that create jobs for those unemployed native-born Americans. It's a static analysis rather than a dynamic, growth-oriented analysis.

Two lines of President Obama's State of the Union address were particularly telling.

First was a vague proposal for a new retirement account or savings bond: "tomorrow, I will direct the Treasury to create a new way for working Americans to start their own retirement savings: myRA. It's a new savings bond that encourages folks to build a nest egg. myRA guarantees a decent return with no risk of losing what you put in."

The president of the American Enterprise Institute, Arthur Brooks, has a long article in the February Issue of Commentary laying out what Mr. Brooks calls "a positive social-justice agenda for the right." He writes:

Most academic research on poverty is eerily divorced from contact with the actual people it references. One of my colleagues tells an instructive story. One afternoon, as he beavered away at his Ph.D. dissertation in a top university's poverty-research center, an actual poor person walked in. He had seen the signs and was simply looking for help. The expert researchers had no idea what to do. Their instinct was to call security.

Mr. Brooks, as usual, has some fine ideas and, as usual, they are well put. But he might be better off avoiding the term "social justice." For one thing, he runs afoul of Hayek, who elsewhere in his essay he cites as an authority. Here is Mr. Brooks:

here is a pop quiz. Which unrepentant statist wrote the following words?

Charles Duross, who served as head of the Department of Justice's Foreign Corrupt Practices Act unit from April 2010 to Friday, January 24, will reportedly join the law firm Morrison and Foerster as a partner starting February 17. From the firm's press release:

"In the last two decades, there have been only three chiefs of DOJ's FCPA program, and Chuck is one them – recognized globally as the leading foreign bribery prosecutor in the United States," said Larren Nashelsky, chair of Morrison & Foerster. "His global role has included deep involvement with the OECD's effort to globalize anti-corruption enforcement, including close cooperation with law enforcement across the country and around the world. Chuck's intimate knowledge of the FCPA enforcement system he was instrumental in creating, along with his relationships with his fellow enforcement officials around the world, will be an invaluable asset to our clients. We are delighted he chose to join MoFo."...

Super Bowl snacks — namely, guacamole and hummus — are the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at Reason (here) and at Newsmax (here).

From a Bloomberg View opinion column by Jonathan Bernstein: "If there is something different among the rich, however, I suspect that a major factor is partisanship and information flows. If you don't like Obama much, you probably don't listen to his speeches very often. So what you know of him comes from news media. And while I don't carefully monitor Fox News or Rush Limbaugh or the rest, I'm pretty confident that the Republican-aligned press spends a lot more time fomenting class warfare than Obama actually does. [emphasis added]"

From a New York Times news article about Senator Schumer, Democrat of New York:

Mr. Schumer accused deep-pocketed backers of the Tea Party movement of cynically manipulating its adherents. "These people are wealthy, hard right, selfish, narrow; people who don't want to pay taxes and don't want government interfering with their companies no matter what damage their companies may do to their workers, to the environment or to anybody else," he said.

From the cover story on Michael Steinhardt (a former partner of mine in the New York Sun) and his WisdomTree ETF business ("Return of the King: The Greatest Trader in Wall Street History is Back and He's Reinventing Investing Again") in the February 10, 2014 issue of Forbes: "Arthur Levitt, who had been chairman of the SEC from 1993 to 2001, was brought on board to help grease the skids with regulators."

What does it say about our system of financial regulation that if you want to start a new consumer-facing investment business the set-up creates incentives to hire government officials to "grease the skids" with their former colleagues?

"Regulators are starting to scrutinize Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway to determine whether it is important enough to the financial system to require Federal Reserve supervision," Bloomberg News reports.

This is a classic. Say what you will about Warren Buffett — and we've been critical of him here at times in connection with his calls for tax increases and on various other issues — he's got a pretty good track record over a pretty long period of managing risk. The Federal Reserve and the federal government, for that matter, not so much, whether it was the housing bubble or whether it is the risk posed to the federal government by the future liabilities of Medicare and Social Security.

In the latest strange move out of the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, a prominent political critic of President Obama, author Dinesh D'Souza, has been indicted. From the press release:

In 2012, the Election Act limited both primary and general election campaign contributions to $2,500 for a total of $5,000 from any individual to any one candidate. In August 2012, D'SOUZA directed other individuals with whom he was associated to make contributions to the campaign committee for a candidate for the United States Senate (the "Campaign Committee") that totaled $20,000. D'SOUZA then reimbursed those individuals for the contributions. ...

"Upward Mobility Has Not Declined, Study Says," is the headline of a New York Times article that is worth a read. I guess President Obama and Bill de Blasio will have to come up with some other reason to justify raising taxes on the "rich."

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates warned in a recent television interview that raising the minimum wage could cause jobs to be replaced with technology, the Independent Journal Review notices. Mr. Gates:

you have to be a bit careful: If you raise the minimum wage, you're encouraging labor substitution, and you're going to go buy machines and automate things — or cause jobs to appear outside of that jurisdiction. And so within certain limits, you know, it does cause job destruction. If you really start pushing it, then you're just making a huge trade-off.