Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech and the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for civil rights are the topics of my column this week. Please check it out at the New York Sun (here) and Newsmax (here). David Brooks makes a similar point in his New York Times column today. And libertarian law professor Richard Epstein offers his own take on the speech and the anniversary at the Hoover Institution's "Defining Ideas" Web site here.

The sports news site Deadspin has an infographic with all 50 states and their highest paid public employee. In a lot of states it is the football or basketball coach at the big public university, while in a few other states it is the college president, law school dean, or medical school dean. It raises the question of why the top-paid state employee is a university official at all, rather than, say, the governor, or the chief justice of the state supreme court, or the head of the state police.

The Boston Globe devotes a long article to the issue:

Other ideas, based on traditional legal and economic remedies for unfairness, can seem a bit utopian (or Orwellian): Hamermesh has proposed "affirmative-action programs for the ugly," or extending the Americans with Disabilities Act to include the unattractive. But without a broad public understanding of the concrete disadvantages of unattractiveness, these ideas sound to many critics like social engineering run amok.

The new president of Yale, Peter Salovey, has posted the text of his address to the college's incoming freshmen, under the headline "Yale and the American Dream." He said:

You, Class of 2017, bring your different cultures, religions, ethnicities, and sexual orientations to this campus. And, as any Yale student will tell you, one of Yale's most inspiring qualities is that Yalies are quite comfortable discussing these differences. You are also an economically diverse group. Some of you hail from families of limited means and others from great abundance. Most of you are from families somewhere in between. And yet, these differences remain just below the surface. Roommates become aware of these disparities, of course, but they are often uncomfortable talking about them and sharing what their lives were like prior to attending Yale. I believe that talking about socioeconomic status is one of the last taboos among Yale students. When the issue of money comes up, students are often profoundly uncomfortable.

The Washington Post reports that "It's a quietly voiced frustration among current and former central bankers that the candidate best qualified to lead the Federal Reserve isn't even being considered by the Obama administration," and then goes on to make that case for that candidate, Stanley Fischer, who recently stepped down as governor of the Bank of Israel.

The Post doesn't say how it knows that Mr. Fischer "isn't even being considered."

John Stossel looks at the evidence on Australia's minimum wage:

In a 2004 study published in the Australian Economic Review, economist Andrew Leigh looked at what happened after Western Australia increased its minimum wage compared to the rest of Australia.

He found: "Relative to the rest of Australia, the [percentage of people employed] in Western Australia fell following each of six [minimum wage] rises." (Study here, update here.)

Another Australian economist, John Humphrey, summarizes the findings this way:

"[Leigh found] that for each 1 percent increase in the minimum wage we can expect... [to lose] 96,000 jobs" in Australia.

Richard Vedder of Ohio University and the American Enterprise Institute writes at Bloomberg View: "According to College Board data, total federal student financial assistance programs totaled $56.8 billion in 2001-2002, compared with $173.8 billion a decade later, an astonishing compounded annual rate of increase of 11.7 percent."

Almost as astonishing as the increase in the overall federal budget over the same period, according to the White House Office of Management and Budget: to $3.6 trillion in 2011 from $1.9 trillion in 2001. When you consider that the federal budget taken as a whole nearly doubled over the decade, the trebling of the federal financial aid budget, while still astonishing, is a little less astonishing than it might otherwise be.

The Wall Street Journal has a report on a report commissioned by Bloomberg L.P. after its journalists were found to be using Bloomberg-terminal customer data to assist their newsgathering:

the company in April restricted its journalists' access to subscriber data, following a complaint from Goldman Sachs Group Inc., a big client.

At the time, it also appointed an executive to a newly created position of client data compliance officer. The report by Promontory found that in the wake of those steps, Bloomberg was in line with appropriate standards for data security and regulatory compliance, based on comparisons to industry standards in place for other financial institutions and data providers. Nevertheless it recommended the creation of a more senior chief risk and compliance officer who would report to the CEO and oversee departments such as client data security, corporate compliance and security.

As state after state outlaws driving while texting, they may want to consider this, from the Huffington Post:

from 1994 to 2011, mobile phone subscriptions increased more than 1,200 percent, from 24 million to 316 million. During that time, the number of traffic fatalities per mile driven has fallen 36 percent, and property-damage-only accidents per mile have fallen 31 percent. ...How is this possible? Either (a) there is no connection between phones and accidents; (b) there is a positive causal connection, but it is swamped by whatever is making the roads safer; or, (c) cell phones are making the roads safer (say, by displacing other, more dangerous distractions, or by causing people to drive cautiously while they're doing something they know is dangerous).

The Chronicle of Higher Education has published the results of the 2013 faculty salary survey of the American Association of University Professors. Columbia tops the list with an average salary for full professors of $212,300; Stanford is next at $207,300; the University of Chicago at $203,600; and Harvard at $203,000.

A new book by Nobel laureate economist Edmund Phelps, Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change, is the subject of my column this week. Please check it out at Newsmax (here), Reason (here), or the New York Sun (here).

USA Today has a sharp editorial about ethanol:

The law, an expansion of a mandate adopted two years earlier, called for impossibly large quantities of corn to go into fuel production rather than onto people's tables, driving up food prices. This year, the mandate requires 16.6 billion gallons of ethanol, absurdly consuming 37% of the nation's corn crop and requiring farm land roughly equal to the size of Kentucky. ...Why would Congress fleece consumers in this way? There's only one reason: to please a well-organized farm lobby, which collects most of the money consumers are forced to waste.

George Will's column about President Obama's "worse than Nixon's" display of executive power begins, "President Obama's increasingly grandiose claims for presidential power are inversely proportional to his shriveling presidency. Desperation fuels arrogance..."

The Washington Examiner's Timothy Carney has an extensive collection of recent news items illustrating what he calls the point that "When government intervenes in the economy, it typically rewards the large and politically connected, hurting the rest of us."

Allan Meltzer, a professor at Carnegie Mellon, looks ahead at interest rates and the effect on the federal budget:

how high will the Fed push up interest rates? Once rates get to 5% or 6%, assuming inflation remains dormant, the Fed can expect a backlash from Congress, the administration, unions, homebuilders, and others.

When contemplating the consequences of this, remember that 40% of US government debt comes due within two years. Rolling it over at higher rates of 4% or 5% would add more than $100 billion to the budget deficit. And that is just the first two years. The budget cost increases every year, as more of the debt rolls over...