The University of Vermont has banned the sale of bottled water on campus, NPR reports. It follows Concord, Massachusetts, which banned the sale of single-serving bottles of water in stores.

I'm a tap-water, not bottled-water, guy myself, but as one commenter pointed out, the law of unintended consequences applies: "The missing information here is whether soda cans are still on sale on the campus. While I understand the motivation behind this move I wonder if the result may not just be that students drink less water and more soft drinks."

My vague impression is that the main thing that was sipped or guzzled at UVM was beer, with milkshakes a distant but respectable second. It'd be interesting if someone compared the pollution effect of those milkshake-producing cows with that of the plastic water bottles.

The Economist has a leader — British for editorial — recommending that Congress scrap the law imposing a limit on the amount of federal debt.

A different view of the debt limit issue (and in my view, a more clever one) comes from Keith Hennessey, who outlines a strategy that Republicans could use to exert leverage on President Obama to restrain spending. It involves how long the debt ceiling will be extended, and which party in the House provides the bulk of the votes.

The press coverage of American Express's announcement that it will eliminate 5,400 jobs (the New York Times printed an Associated Press dispatch; Bloomberg coverage is here; the Wall Street Journal' article is here) manages to omit the highly pertinent fact that the American Express CEO, Kenneth Chenault, is a member of President Obama's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.

If it were some Wall Street-White House crony of a Republican president announcing significant layoffs, it's hard to imagine that the press would miss the opportunity to make the connection.

President Obama's choice of Jack Lew as Treasury secretary means that the prediction I made in my "Office Pool 2013" column published on December 17, 2012 was three for three. From the column:

The most bitter confirmation battle will be a) Chuck Hagel's nomination to be defense secretary, opposed by pro-Israel groups alarmed at his record b) John Brennan's nomination to be CIA director, opposed by anti-waterboarding activists on the left and right c) Jacob Lew's nomination to be Treasury secretary, unexpectedly mired in questions over his post-NYU, pre-Obama administration work for Citigroup.

Hagel, Brennan, and Lew were all nominated for the jobs I predicted they would be in the column. Whether that's good for the country is a separate question. None of the three was a total surprise pick, but in each case there were other candidates whose names were being floated.

The New York Times has a front-page news article about the Daniel Loeb versus William Ackman faceoff over Herbalife that was covered here yesterday. It's instructive:

In the end, the short-seller had a bold prediction: federal regulators would eventually shut down the company...."While the short-seller's presentation was lengthy, it presented no evidence to show that Herbalife has crossed a line that would compel regulators to shut it down," Mr. Loeb wrote, taking a shot at Mr. Ackman.

The investment proposition here, in other words, is almost dependent less on what you think the company is going to do than on what you think the regulators are going to do. It's an interesting situation, and certainly one that underscores the need for regulators who are impartial.

In the dispute between hedge fund managers Daniel Loeb (Third Point) and William Ackman (Pershing) over Herbalife (Mr. Ackman is reportedly short $1 billion, Mr. Loeb reportedly long somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million) I don't have a position. I'm not long or short Herbalife and I haven't looked at the company closely enough to form an opinion.

What I do find interesting, however, is the news today, via a Dow Jones dispatch sourced to a anonymous "person close to the probe," that enforcement officials in the New York office of the Securities and Exchange Commission have "opened an inquiry" into Herbalife.

Peter Orszag, the former Obama budget director who is now vice chairman of Citigroup, has a Bloomberg op-ed praising a federal provision encouraging doctors to expand "clinical data registries" that will help researchers better understand both patient outcomes and health expenditures.

Richard Epstein's weekly column makes the case that the Constitution requires a flat tax:

it is also necessary to insist, as a constitutional matter, that all taxes be flat, as yet another protection against the risks of redistribution through faction. This can be done through a consistent application of the Takings Clause.

Many people might be either aghast or amazed at so strong a claim. But in its short form, the argument runs as follows. There is, in principle, no watertight distinction between taxes and takings. With the latter, the government occupies property, for which it must pay compensation. With the former, it threatens to seize property, via a tax lien, if taxes are not paid. In both cases, the government is allowed to take so long as it supplies compensation.

Bloomberg View has a mostly sensible editorial about the need to reform the Social Security disability insurance program: "Rather than help people manage their disabilities so they can rejoin the labor force, the 1960s-era program cultivates dependency by guaranteeing health insurance and an income for life. The surest way to lose benefits is by getting a job, because monthly income above roughly $1,040 results in dismissal from the program....A 2002 paper by three economists showed that disability applications from the Appalachian coal-mining region increased when energy prices fell."

From a Bloomberg slideshow on "best-performing hedge funds managing $1 billion or more": "Three of the top five funds in the Bloomberg Markets list invested in mortgage securities... Betting on mortgage securities outpaced every other strategy, with an average return of 20.2 percent, against an industry average of just 1.3 percent, according to data compiled by Bloomberg."

President Obama's decision to name Mohamed A. El-Erian, the CEO of Pacific Investment Management Company, as the chairman of his Global Development Council is the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at Reason (here) or the New York Sun (here).

Gordon Crovitz has a really wonderful Wall Street Journal article about Al Jazeera, the television network to which Al Gore chose to sell Current TV. The sale provides Mr. Gore with a reported $100 million (his partners got another $400 million), and it provides Al Jazeera with something it had long sought, which is access to American cable viewers. My favorite paragraph of Mr. Crovitz's article is this one:

In 2008, Al Jazeera threw an on-air party for Samir Kuntar when he was released from an Israeli prison. Kuntar led a Palestine Liberation Front terrorist team that kidnapped an Israeli family in 1979. He shot the father and killed the 4-year-old daughter by smashing her head against rocks along the beach. In footage available on YouTube, Al Jazeera's Beirut bureau chief hands Kuntar a scimitar to cut the celebratory cake and says: "This is the sword of the Arabs, Samir."

The University of Chicago's John Cochrane writes, "Who won the fiscal cliff negotiations? Democrats? Republicans? VP Joe Biden? No. Tax lawyers, accountants, and lobbyists."

One sign the bloat in higher education is getting out of control is that even the left is starting to notice. The left-wing web site Daily Kos picks up a Wall Street Journal report about the University of Minnesota:

A Wall Street Journal analysis of University of Minnesota salary and employment records from 2001 through last spring shows that the system added more than 1,000 administrators over that period. Their ranks grew 37%, more than twice as fast as the teaching corps and nearly twice as fast as the student body. [...] Administrators making over $300,000 in inflation-adjusted terms rose to 17 from seven.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has wrapped up its investigation of David Sokol, a former executive of a Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary, and concluded he did not do anything wrong, Mr. Sokol's lawyer tells Dow Jones.

This confirms the post here back when the story of Mr. Sokol's personal investment in Lubrizol, a company that was then bought by Berkshire after Mr. Sokol's suggestion, originally broke back in March 2011: "Regular readers of this site know I'm a frequent critic of Berkshire CEO Warren Buffett, but in this case, on the basis of the information that's out there so far, I think he and Mr. Sokol are getting a bit of a raw deal in the press coverage."