Steven A. Cohen hasn't been charged with any wrongdoing and his spokesman tells the New York Times "Mr. Cohen and SAC are confident that they have acted appropriately and will continue to cooperate with the government's inquiry."

Nevertheless, the latest case brought by the SEC and the Justice Department against a former employee of his firm raises some interesting questions.

Just in time for the Thanksgiving travel rush, the Boston Globe has a news article about a surplus store that resells items surrendered by passengers at airport security checkpoints:

[The Transportation Security Administration] does not like to say they confiscate items. "They're surrendered," Davis said. ..

First, there are the accidental things, the sort that travelers might understandably forget they had in their possession. The core of this cache is pocketknives and tools, such as screwdrivers and corkscrews. They get them by the thousands, so many that there is an entire subculture of resellers who start waiting in line two hours before the surplus store opens so they can pounce on the newest inventory and then turn it around on eBay....

TSA collects so many miniature multitools and Swiss Army knives that each model has its own bin at the surplus store, where they sell for $2.

The next major category is the laughable...

Snow globes. Come on, TSA.

Thomas Friedman, writing in the New York Times: "the right mix of tax increases, spending cuts and investment incentives will spur more start-ups, lead to more risk-taking, inspire more entrepreneurship and create more jobs."

He doesn't say what that "right mix" is, but it would make a fine follow-up column for Mr. Friedman to explain how tax increases of any mix would "spur more start-ups, lead to more risk-taking, inspire more entrepreneurship and create more jobs."

Where is the experiential evidence for that, exactly? I rarely agree with Mr. Friedman's op-ed page colleagues Nicholas Kristof and Paul Krugman, but they've been arguing that the combination of tax increases and spending cuts known as "austerity" in Europe has failed. If Mr. Friedman disagrees with them it would be illuminating to see him confront them more directly. Maybe they could do an online debate.

Former Federal Reserve official Bob McTeer writes on his blog about the labor dispute that put Hostess, the baked-goods manufacturer, into liquidation: "There should be a law to withhold unemployment benefits from the members of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union who voted themselves and their fellow workers out of work."

An interesting window into how technology can cut health care costs arrived yesterday in the form of a postcard from a company called Teladoc, which, in New York, is offering a deal by which an individual can pay $30 a year ($50 for a family) and get the ability to access a Beth Israel hospital doctor via phone or online video for $38 a consult. The Web site claims that the access to the doctors is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and that the doctors will respond within an hour to a request for a consultation. The firm also offers its services (which do not all involve Beth Israel doctors) to organizations and claims it serves more than 4.5 million members.

A telephone or video consultation isn't always a perfect substitute for an in-person exam, but so long as one keeps that in mind, there's probably some room for this sort of thing in the market for health care.

Mitt Romney's explanation of his election loss — that President Obama bought the election with "gifts" such as health insurance coverage and student loan forgiveness — is the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), or Newsmax (here). It was also excerpted at National Review Online (here).

Two other takes on the "gifts" explanation struck me as worth passing along.

One, by Rabbi Steven Pruzansky, writing, in the Jewish Press:

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein's weekly column suggests "We should scrap the current system in favor of a flat tax on consumption."

A front-page New York Times article by David Kocieniewski that is also republished at CNBC reports: "In 1970, there were 14 tax brackets for the top 2 percent of earners, with a top rate of 91 percent."

That "91 percent" figure for 1970 is inaccurate. According to the Tax Foundation, the top rate in 1970 was 70%; according to the Tax Policy Center, it was 71.75%.

Maybe the reporter just hit a 7 instead of a 6, and meant 1960 instead of 1970. Or maybe it's just another example of the Times trying to pretend that the Kennedy tax cut never happened.

A post here last month said, "It's almost reflexive in some newsrooms, this tendency to turn every news event into an opportunity for another sermon on the evils and unfairness of asset inequality."

The latest example comes from the Daily Beast, which covers "an often-ignored factor in American Jewish discourse over Israel: income inequality."

I don't mean to be callous about income inequality, asset inequality or press bias, but once one starts noticing this sort of thing there starts to be a kind of humor to it.

The New York Times has a pretty fair-minded front-page look at how federal disaster aid, along with flood insurance, encourages people to build in flood zones.

Bloomberg News reports: "Investors have seen $806 billion erased from the value of American equities since President Barack Obama was re-elected Nov. 6."

As Reuters put it, "The pace of the U.S. stock market's sell-off accelerated following President Barack Obama's first press conference since re-election, where he reiterated his call for the wealthy to pay higher taxes."

The New York Times has the back story on the bright idea of putting a lot of vulnerable elderly people on the front lines of a hurricane:

The urban renewal program of slum clearance, a federal program begun in 1949 and locally controlled by Robert Moses, used eminent domain to acquire and destroy thousands of the remaining bungalows. "Many had already been converted into substandard welfare housing," Jack Eichenbaum, the Queens borough historian, said. In their place went swaths of public housing projects.

Ms. Vitullo-Martin wrote, "The city also used federal and state financing to support the development of dozens of nursing homes."

...One reason for building housing projects in the Rockaways was that their residents were thought not to need easy access to the city's job centers. The same reasoning made the peninsula a logical choice for nursing homes. As with much of urban renewal, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, was in Iowa over the weekend. Politico has a report, including at least one good line from Mr. Rubio: "The way to turn our economy around is not by making rich people poorer, but make poor people richer."

The Believer has an essay about fine art and finance. Even if one disagrees with the essay at times, there are some facts and history that may be of interest:

Paul Sachs, an early partner at the family firm, left banking to become a specialist in Italian Renaissance art, and to found the program in curatorial studies at Harvard. Robert Lehman and his father, Philip Lehman, each of whom ran Lehman Brothers, together assembled one of the great collections of Florentine and Sienese art outside Italy. Even the bank established to bail these other banks out, the Federal Reserve, had at its inception Paul Warburg. Warburg, often referred to as the "father" of the Federal Reserve, was the brother of Aby Warburg, one of the greatest scholars of the Italian Renaissance. In much the same way that aptitudes for math and music seem to descend together in families, so do there seem to be lineages for those gifted in the representation of value: the bankers and the painters.

Exports of natural gas from America to overseas — the topic of posts here in May and June — are the topic of a column in today's Wall Street Journal by John Bussey, who opines, sensibly: "Best, says Brookings, for the government to neither promote nor limit exports. Let the market do the work. Which may be the best advice of all."