President Biden's threat to seize the superyachts and luxury apartments of Russian "oligarchs" was the topic of a recent column of mine. Please check out the full column at Newsmax ("Fifth Amendment May Be Casualty in Ukraine War") and at the New York Sun ("Seizing Russians' Property Would Make Fifth Amendment a War Casualty").

Ukraine's order barring men between the ages of 18 and 60 from leaving the country is the topic of my column this week. Please check the full column out at Reason ("Ukraine Can't Defend Its Freedom With an Army of Conscripts") and at Newsmax ("Biden's Border Policy Undercuts 'Freedom' Claim: Let Ukrainian Men Leave").

Elliott Abrams has a new piece out, worth a look, offering thoughts on how America should respond to the Russia-China axis. His main recommendation is a big increase in defense spending, but I was also struck by this thought:

We must resist the temptation to conclude that in such a dangerous world, promotion of freedom is a luxury we cannot afford. On the contrary, freedom is one of the most powerful weapons in our hands; it is what separates us morally from the Russian and Chinese regimes, and this is understood around the globe even if we sometimes ignore it. ...Reagan always understood that the Cold War was more than a conflict among states; it was even more fundamentally an ideological conflict between the forces of liberty and the powers that would snuff it out nation by nation until our own was in jeopardy.

Warren Buffett's letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders about the company's 2021 performance was released this weekend. To me the most newsworthy aspect of it is that while philanthropies such as the Ford Foundation are ostentatiously divesting from fossil fuels, Buffett is buying. The table in the letter listing Berkshire's 15 largest equity holdings as of December 31, 2021 includes a stake in Chevron worth about $4.5 billion and an investment in Occidental Petroleum valued at about $10.7 billion. Berkshire also owns a 38.6 percent stake in Pilot Corp., and the letter says that "early in 2023, Berkshire will purchase an additional interest in Pilot that will raise our ownership to 80 percent." The Buffett letter describes Pilot as "a leader in travel centers," but that is a euphemism. The Pilot Flying J website says "Pilot Company has grown its network to more than 800 retail and fueling locations and as the third largest tanker fleet in North America, supplies more than 12 billion gallons of fuel per year."

A development to house the homeless in Los Angeles will cost $837,000 for a housing unit, Nellie Bowles notices in her Friday newsletter for the Bari Weiss "Common Sense" Substack. She writes:

How could they possibly spend that much on a single unit and think it's good? Easy. California uses its homeless budget as a cash firehose, lining the pockets of untold numbers of contractors and employing every drama major who thinks nonprofits seem cool. It's the Homeless Industrial Complex. The actual people sleeping on the streets—some 41,000 souls in Los Angeles—are beside the point.

A statement from President Biden's national security advisor that "America will have the backs of our friends in the region" is the topic of my latest column. Please check it out at Newsmax ("With Biden, America's Friends Need to Watch Their Backs") and at the New York Sun ("With Friends Like President Biden...").

Left-leaning New York Times columnist Ezra Klein concedes government is sometimes the problem, and calls for a "louder and more insistent" effort against counterproductive regulations. He has an interview with Treasury Secretary Yellen in which he describes her as agreeing. Klein writes:

But if Democrats don't always admit how much government can do to help, they also don't always admit how much it can do to hurt. The market would build more housing if local zoning czars would let them. Companies were clamoring to sell more rapid tests earlier, but the F.D.A. wouldn't let them. All across the country, nuclear and solar and wind projects are being tied up in red tape.

You can go too far with this, and Republicans often do. The frustrating truth of regulation is there's no one position you can have on it. Good regulations are good, bad regulations are bad. But bad regulations are hard to unwind, and they're often unseen.

John Durham, the special counsel investigating aspects of the 2016 election, made a court filing on Friday with the ho-hum title of "Government's motion to inquire into potential conflicts of interest." The Washington Examiner has some coverage, headlined "Durham says Democrat-allied tech executive spied on Trump's White House office," that gets at the key point in the case. The Examiner article also has embedded the pdf of the Durham filing.

The case is a prosecution against the general counsel to Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign, Michael A. Sussman. The Examiner article explains:

Criminal justice reform—particularly around prosecutors—is the topic of my most recent column. Please check out the full column at Newsmax ("Will Issue of Prosecutorial Reform Mean Resurgence for Trump?") and at the New York Sun ("While Decrying Misconduct, Let's Not Forget the Prosecutors").

"Preet Bharara's New Children's Book Does America an Injustice" is the headline over an article I have up over at Education Next. Please check the article out over there.

New York Times op-ed page column by Ross Douthat, today: "The powerful belief that only CNN — indeed, only Jeff Zucker — stood between democracy and authoritarianism encouraged the abandonment of normal journalistic standards, the sacrifice of sobriety and neutrality to what Armin Rosen, writing for UnHerd, dubs the 'centrist-branded panic industry.'"

Lead article on NYT.com, same day: "'Taking the Voters Out of the Equation': How the Parties Are Killing Competition. The number of competitive House districts is dropping, as both Republicans and Democrats use redistricting to draw themselves into safe congressional seats. The decline is the latest sign of dysfunction in the American political system, already grappling with misinformation and rising distrust in elections."

"What time is it?" as James Taranto used to mockingly ask in his Best of the Web newsletter for the Wall Street Journal editorial page. "The time is now to begin destigmatizing greater democratic control over price levels," the director of governance studies at the Roosevelt Institute, Todd Tucker, writes in the Washington Post.

Tucker helpfully notes:

at the peak of price control efforts in World War II, the government employed 160,000 price regulators. While widespread use of digital payments could make enforcement easier, the economy has grown substantially, and it is likely many more officials would need to be hired. That capacity won't be developed overnight, so if we think future crises might merit price controls, expanding governments' abilities now to track prices throughout supply chains is a must.

It's not clear if Tucker means "many more" than there are now, or "many more" than the 160,000 supposedly employed during World War II.

The announcement by Justice Breyer of his decision to retire from the Supreme Court sent me back into the archives for the post "Justice Breyer on Airline Deregulation." Before Breyer was a Supreme Court Justice, he was an aide to Senator Edward Kennedy at a time when even Democrats were able to see that reducing regulation could help consumers. See also, on this topic, "Trump, Deregulation, and the Boeing Crashes."

The U.S.-China rivalry is the topic of my latest column. Please read it at Newsmax ("Xi Owns Policy Debates — For Now") or the New York Sun ("What Might Awaken Americans to the War With Communist China?").

Michelle Wu in Boston and Muriel Bowser in Washington, D.C. are among the Democratic women mayors deploying heavy equipment to clear the homeless encampments that have cropped up in American cities. Please check out my full column on the topic at Newsmax ("Heavy Equipment for Heavy Lifting of the Homeless") and at the New York Sun ("Women Mayors Are Showing Some Steel in Dealing With Homelessness").