There are all kinds of different possible ways to interpret President Obama's call last night, in his State of the Union Address, to increase the federal minimum wage to $9 an hour by 2015 from the $5.85 an hour at which it stood in June 2007.

But the way that makes most sense is as a measure of the decline in the purchasing power of a dollar.

One can look at this from the perspective of an employer, and say that the $5.85 that bought an hour of labor in June 2007 will, by the end of Mr. Obama's presidency, buy only 39 minutes of labor. In other words, in a mere 8 years, an entire 21 minutes out of the hour's worth of work has been taken away from the employer by the Federal Reserve to which Congress has delegated its power to "coin money" and "regulate the value thereof."

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein's latest column is about the Boy Scouts of America. He advises the organization to "work for an amicable separation instead of a fractious union," splitting into two different groups, one that welcomes gays and one that does not.

USA Today has a news article about a study by an Oregon endocrinologist who bought "55 bottles of vitamin D supplements from 12 different manufacturers." The study found the actual amounts of Vitamin D in the pills "ranged from 9% to 140% of what was on the label."

The closest match to the advertised dose was one brand with the seal of the U.S. Pharmacopeial Convention (USP), a voluntary, non-profit testing group, the article reports. The article doesn't name the brand, which isn't particularly helpful to readers.

The article reports that the doctor who did the research "says her study is evidence that more regulation is needed to get companies in line."

NPR notices a significant story widely ignored or downplayed by other news outlets: "U.S. Fertility Rates Fall To All-Time Low."

Not a great sign for America's hopes of competing with China or India in human capital or geopolitics, or for an entitlement system that relies on current workers paying in to support Social Security and Medicare payments to retirees.

One approach for Senator Rubio in his Republican response to President Obama's State of the Union address tonight would be to propose the "Barack Obama Campaign Promise Implementation Act." That's the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here).

The New York City cable news channel NY1 has asked your editor to participate in its State of the Union coverage tonight on a panel before and after the remarks by President Obama and Senator Rubio. If you are within the NY1 viewing audience, tune in and let me know what you think.

The New York subways are plastered with ads for the state lottery (examples are here, here, and here) with the slogan "Multiply Your Money." That's a deceptive, dishonest, misleading ad, because the government makes money on these lottery games, so on a net overall basis, the players don't multiply their money, they subtract or divide their money, winding up with less of it than they had in the first place.

If some privately held Las Vegas or Atlantic City casino tried advertising in New York Subways telling customers they could "multiply their money," the state attorney general would be all over them with false advertising claims. But because it's the government doing the deceptive advertising here, the government gets away with it. It's maddening even for those of us who don't buy lottery tickets.

Whatever you think of David Einhorn — and in general I'm not a big fan of short-sellers who go around talking publicly about the problems with stocks they are shorting — it sure looks like he's playing a constructive role in his intervention with Apple.

It's been reported that Mr. Einhorn's hedge fund owns about 1.3 million shares of Apple, or a little more than $600 million worth. The interesting thing about the situation is that, according to Apple's latest proxy statement, all of Apple's current executive officers and directors (including Al Gore) own a mere 578,696 shares in the company, valued today at around $275 million.

And yet Mr. Einhorn, who owns more of the company than management does, has to sue them or make a big public fuss to get them to do what he wants with the extra cash.

There are a lot of companies out there like this, where the management owns a trivial percentage of the company, and is less than totally responsive to the shareholders who own more than they do.

Boston Globe columnist Scot Lehigh, who is not exactly anyone's idea of a right-winger, has a column denouncing Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick's proposal to raise the state's income taxes on higher earners to fund an annual spending increase of 7.5% as "an attempt to slip the surly bonds of fiscal gravity, the better to indulge liberal daydreams."

He reports that the governor, in addition to raising income taxes, would also add "another $220 million in taxes on tobacco, candy, and soda."

Harry Binswanger has an article in Forbes outlining a natural rights case in favor of open immigration and debunking some of the arguments against such a policy. "The principle of individual rights demands open immigration," he writes.

George Will has a column on the need for a constitutional amendment to limit spending by requiring a balanced budget:

Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.), supported by Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, proposed offsetting just $17 billion of the $60 billion aid for victims of Superstorm Sandy and doing so by cutting just 1.63 percent from discretionary government spending. Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), chairman of the Appropriations Committee, said this would "slash and burn" important programs, and the measure failed because 71 Republicans opposed it.

The chairman of the Idaho Senate's education committee, John Goedde, has introduced a bill that would require every Idaho student to read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and to pass a test on it before graduating high school, the Spokesman-Review reports.

The state senator clarifies that he doesn't intend to hold a hearing on the bill or move forward with enacting it, but that he just wanted to make a point about graduation requirements.

The story reminded me of how the great historian of the Holocaust, Lucy Dawidowicz, reacted once when she was asked whether there ought to be mandatory Holocaust education in American schools. As I recall the anecdote, which was related by Seth Lipsky, she said something to the effect that she'd be happy if the students learned about the Constitution.

That's about how I feel about forcing high school students to read Atlas Shrugged. I'd be happy if they read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Once that's mastered, we can have a conversation about what else to read.

The prepared text of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's speech from yesterday is up at the American Enterprise Institute Web site. It's well worth a look for those interested in the future of the Republican domestic policy agenda.

The Wall Street Journal has a fine editorial and Bloomberg has a fine news article highlighting the irony that even as the Justice Department is suing Standard and Poor's for doing a bad job of rating mortgage-backed securities in the run-up to the financial crisis, the Securities and Exchange Commission is essentially giving S&P its stamp of approval, and mandating its use, as a "Nationally Recognized Statistical Ratings Organization."

The Journal editorial asks, "as a modest first step before suing a company for $5 billion, shouldn't the government at least stop mandating its products."

The Bloomberg article outlines the barriers that the SEC imposes on companies that might want to compete with S&P, Moody's, and Fitch:

Ann Rutledge, a structured finance specialist, has watched her application to become an NRSRO languish at the SEC for 20 months. ...

The eighth paragraph of a front-page New York Times article about the budget battle in Washington contains the following sentence: "Mr. Obama, who missed a deadline this week to submit his annual budget to Congress, acknowledged on Tuesday that a broader deficit agreement is unlikely to be reached by the March deadline."

It seems to me that this missed deadline might be worth more than just a clause, but an entire story. Yahoo! News has an article from ABC that explains further:

"By law, the president is required to submit a budget request to Congress for the upcoming fiscal year by the first Monday of February. The only time Obama met the deadline during his presidency was in 2011.