Mitt Romney's debate line that "You couldn't have people opening up banks in their — in their garage and making loans" is the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at Time (here), The New York Sun (here), and Reason (here).

Until I read John Allison's The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure, I was pretty much of the belief that the last thing America needed was yet another book on the financial crisis.

But this book is so good that it's worth reading. Mr. Allison brings to the table both a free-market perspective and firsthand experience as a bank executive (CEO of BB&T) during the crisis. Few if any of the journalists, economists, and government officials who have written that bookshelf-full of other books on the topic have that to offer.

Here are some examples of things that I was unaware of until I read Mr. Allison's book, even though I have already read a lot of other books, reports, and articles and watched a lot of congressional hearings and commission meetings about the financial crisis:

President Obama has been running around trying to blame the Republican House of Representatives for layoffs of teachers, police officers, and firefighters. Yet today's jobs report, as E.J. McMahon of the Manhattan Institute's Empire Center reports at the web site Public Sector Inc., "indicates that a net 2,500 jobs were added to local government education payrolls between August and September, for a total gain of 10,000 since September 2011. ...Government at every level contributed 10,000 new jobs to the net total of 114,000 created in September, on a seasonally adjusted basis."

The Department of Homeland Security has helped to bust a "large scale Canada-U.S. cheese smuggling operation," NPR reports. The idea was to sell in Canada cheese from America, where prices "are anywhere from a third to half what they are in Canada."

Any time there is such a dramatic price difference it's a good indication that government interference in a free market is involved, and sure enough, the NPR article makes reference to "import duties" that are in force to protect Canada's dairy industry from foreign competition. It may be that American farm subsidies are keeping prices artificially low on this side of the border, too. (An earlier article here reported that the American government decided 50 years ago to subsidize cheddar cheese, but no other kind.)

This site often criticizes journalists for inaccurate predictions or flawed frameworks. So when a writer gets it spectacularly right, it's only fair to mark that moment, too. An example is the sportswriter Murray Chass, who warned in November 2011 that the Boston Red Sox shouldn't hire Bobby Valentine as their manager. The Red Sox fired Valentine this morning, in what amounted to an admission that Mr. Chass was correct back in 2011. As the Red Sox made clear in their comments, the bad season wasn't entirely the manager's fault. But sometimes a journalist gets it right.

Tonight's presidential debate was illuminating yet bizarre.

Illuminating, because Mitt Romney effectively made the point that he trusts the private sector better than the federal government, while President Obama made clear at every turn that he views private companies as evildoers that citizens need to be protected from. President Obama attacked ExxonMobil by name: "does anybody think that ExxonMobil needs some extra money?" Mr. Obama attacked health insurance companies, saying that Mr. Romney would leave "folks like my grandmother at the mercy of the private insurance system." Mr. Obama said Medicare is better than private insurance because "private insurers have to make a profit," which "has to come from somewhere." Mr. Obama said his health care law means "insurance companies can't jerk you around." He said before the student loan program was changed, "we were sending $60 billion to banks and lenders as middlemen." He claimed credit for "reining in the excesses of Wall Street."

The giant mutual fund and ETF company Vanguard announced yesterday that it is changing the benchmarks for a series of its funds totaling about $367 billion, including some of its largest, to those developed by University of Chicago's Center for Research in Security Prices. It's dropping benchmarks that had been developed by MSCI, a publicly traded Morgan Stanley spinoff.

NPR has a news story on what it says is a shortage of apple pickers in Washington State.

The fastest workers can earn about $1,000 per week....

But the work is physically demanding. Jeff Rippon, a manager at nearby Chiawana Orchards, says pickers have to scale tall ladders and carry 40-pound sacks of apples on their chests for at least eight hours a day. He'll hire anyone who wants the work, but he says he has trouble finding enough people. So like many farmers across the country, he ends up relying on migrant workers.

"I've been picking apples since 1965 and I've never seen a white person yet pick more than an hour," Rippon says. "Seriously! By the time you get the paperwork done, they've decided it's too hard to do."

It's hard to quantify, but might this be part of the national unemployment problem? That there are some jobs, even decently paying ones, that some people have decided "it's too hard to do"?

From the Washington Post newspaper's account of a decision by the Washington Post Co. to acquire Celtic Healthcare, a hospice and home healthcare firm:

Celtic Healthcare relies heavily on funds from Medicare, which provides hospice benefits "for extended periods of time based on the assessment of the patient," according to Celtic's Web site. In its blog last November and again last month, the company posted appeals from health industry groups asking people to lobby Congress to defeat Medicare funding cuts and increases in co-pays.

A District of Columbia Advisory Neighborhood Commission voted 4 to 2 in favor of designating a church a historic landmark even though the church's pastor and its members oppose the designation. The Washington Post has details.

New York Times columnist David Brooks writes in his proposed debate opening statement for Mitt Romney:

Democrats are campaigning as the party that will fight to the death to preserve the Medicare status quo. If they win, the lesson will be: Never Touch Medicare. No Democrat or Republican will dare reform the system, and we will go bankrupt.

It had looked to us like Mitt Romney was the one campaigning as the one who would fight to preserve the Medicare status quo.

A wave of vetoes of Democrat-sponsored bills by California Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. is the subject of my column this week: "a catalog of left-wing ideas that are so bad they are unacceptable even for a left-wing governor." Sometimes the most important thing a governor can do is say "no." Please check out the column at Reason (here) or the New York Sun (here).

Two vending machines in the lobby of the Brooklyn Public Library dispensing 20-ounce bottles of non-diet Snapple were the subject of a post here last month. The latest example of drinks larger than the mayor wants to allow being sold on city government property comes from the snack bar at the Parade Grounds playing fields in Brooklyn's Prospect Park, which is selling 20-ounce non-diet sodas, "proceeds benefit Prospect Park."

The quarterly drive for paying subscribers that we've been running here this week is wrapping up today, so this will be the last pitch. The response so far has been really encouraging, but we are still just short of our participation goal, so if you have been meaning to do this, or are even halfway thinking about it, please seize the moment. Reasons for helping were outlined earlier this week in Ten Reasons to Become a Paying Subscriber, and, if you have any questions, they were probably covered in the Frequently Asked Questions. Bottom line: an entry-level $49 annual subscription is less than $1 a week, entitles you to receive quarterly reports sent only to paying subscribers, is crucial to sustaining the site's operations, and will send an encouraging signal of support for what we do here. Thank you to all who have already participated. The rest of you, please, help out. The link is here.

The federal government is spending about $1.6 billion a year providing free cellular phones with subsidized "lifeline" service to 12.5 million poor or disabled users, Fox News reports.

A viral YouTube video about the program with a woman explaining she will vote for President Obama because he gave her a phone has drawn more than a million views.