Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein's column this week is about Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind. Professor Epstein writes:

Haidt does not address the reasons why moral intuitions break down in complex social institutions. Instead, he puts forward the view that it is a good thing to agree to disagree when people fundamentally differ about the relative importance of what he thinks are the six values that undergird our morality: care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. Haidt's insight that liberals tend to rely on care and fairness, while conservatives rely on all six values equally, is meant to tip his hat, however slightly, to the conservative side of the line.

Bloomberg News has a useful look at compensation at some of the New York-based nonprofit arts institutions. "Nonprofit" is a term of the art here, because while the organizations may be structured as nonprofits under the tax law and while their goal may not be to maximize profits, the amount of money being paid out in compensation to the employees is more than at many institutions whose goal is to make a profit.

Bloomberg reports that at the Metropolitan Opera, "Master electrician Paul Donahue, earned $516,577 in pay and benefits in 2010, up 18 percent from a year earlier. The stagehand's compensation topped that of the best-paid stagehand at Carnegie Hall, Dennis O'Connell, who earned $436,097 that year, according to the tax return of Carnegie Hall."

A Met spokesman told Bloomberg the electrician's compensation "had to do with accrued vacation payments and the variable nature of the Met's work schedule."

A math professor at Drexel University, Andrew Hicks, was recently awarded a patent for a side-view car mirror that could eliminate the "blind spot," but the federal Department of Transportation has a regulation in place that forbids the use of such mirrors. Technology Review magazine has the details.

Sometime, by imposing a single uniform standard, regulation has the effect of dampening innovation or competition. If there weren't a regulation mandating side view mirrors that meet certain specifications, car companies might compete for customers by offering better side view mirrors, and insurance companies might charge customers different rates depending on whether their cars have better side view mirrors.

Senator McCain's wild accusation that Sheldon and Miriam Adelson's contributions to a superpac supporting Mitt Romney mean that "foreign money is coming into an American campaign" is the topic of my column this week. Please check it out here at the New York Sun or here at Reason.com.

ABC News notices that President Obama has played his 100th round of golf as president, which is up from the 24 times George W. Bush went golfing in eight years.

The ABC news article quotes Mitt Romney complaining, "I scratch my head at the capacity of the president to take four hours off on such a regular basis to go golfing...I would think you could kind of suck it up for four years, particularly when the American people are out of work."

It seems to me Mr. Romney doesn't quite have it right. It might help the economy if President Obama spent more time golfing and less time in his office making decisions, signing legislation, or making pronouncements that are unhelpful to the economy.

Rajat Gupta, the Harvard Business School graduate and former managing director of McKinsey & Co. convicted by a jury today on some counts of leaking inside information as a Goldman Sachs director, turns out to have been a donor to Democratic candidates, Federal Election Commission records show.

Among his larger gifts: $10,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2005, $10,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2006, $10,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2008, $2,500 to the Obama Victory Fund in 2008, and $25,000 to Kerry Victory 2004 in 2004. He also gave $1,000 each to Al Gore and Hillary Clinton in 2000.

There will probably be some calls for the DCCC to give back the $30,000, or to donate it to charity, but they could also argue that they had no way of knowing that Gupta was crooked or that it was so long ago that they have already spent the money.

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A group of businessmen with ties to Warren Buffett, George Soros, President Obama, and socialist senator Bernie Sanders are pushing a plan to use the government's power of eminent domain to seize billions of dollars worth of underwater mortgages from banks and bondholders.

Word of the plan surfaced earlier this month in a Reuters dispatch that reported the eminent domain strategy but not the political ties of the businessmen involved in the plan nor their links to two of America's most prominent and outspoken billionaires. The Reuters article said a firm called Mortgage Resolution Partners, chaired by Steven Gluckstern, a former owner of the New York Islanders hockey team, was working with politicians in Nevada, Florida, and California's San Bernadino County to advance the plan.

"The Grumpy Economist," the University of Chicago's John Cochrane, reviews John Taylor's book First Principles: Five Keys To Restoring America's Prosperity.

What a fascinating and in many ways emblematic situation is unfolding concerning the compensation of Sir Martin Sorrell, the chief executive of the public relations and advertising firm WPP. Sixty percent of shareholders reportedly voted to reject his 13 million Euro ($16.3 million dollar) compensation package. The Independent reports that Sir Martin owns 1.4% of the firm, and that he built the firm over 27 years. Shareholders may reasonably reply that he has already been well compensated in the past for his past successes, that 1.4% is significantly less than a majority of shares, and that $16.3 million a year is a bit rich for a firm of its size whose share price hasn't appreciated much over the past dozen years (though there have been dividends).

Newton, Mass., the home base of House financial services committee chairman Barney Frank, is considering a one-year ban on new bank branches opening in the city, the Boston Globe reports:

A Newton economic development advisory group is pushing for a moratorium on new banks in the city, saying that they crowd out other merchants and drain the energy from villages at night...

The Economic Development Commission has proposed that for one year, banks would have to obtain a special permit to open on the ground floor of business districts. Banks usually are able to move into storefronts in commercial areas without special permits...

There are at least 31 bank offices in Newton, according to federal records...

Mitt Romney's private equity firm, Bain Capital, has been in the news lately because of the Republican presidential candidate's record there, which is being attacked by President Obama.

But Mr. Romney turns out not to be the only participant in the public policy debate these days with a Bain Capital pedigree. Edward Conard was a Bain Capital partner from 1993 to 2007, headed its New York office, and is out with a new book, Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You've Been Told About the Economy Is Wrong. It's a dense, quirky, highly analytic book about why America's economy has done better than international competitors and about how to avoid ruining that success.

The chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, appeared this morning before the Senate banking committee, and while it had been touted as a chance for the senators to grill Mr. Dimon about the bank's London trading losses, in a weird way Mr. Dimon probably helped himself, and his bank, with the appearance.

He ingratiated himself with the Republicans by basically agreeing with their criticism of one of President Obama's signature pieces of legislation, the Dodd-Frank financial "reform" bill. He said it had created confusion and added compliance costs.

Driven by the approach of both Father's Day (a boon to booksellers) and Election Day (a boon to sellers of political books), recent weeks have seen the arrival of a series of books by conservative authors. There's enough overlap among three of them — The Death of Liberalism by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.; The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat In The War Of Ideas by Jonah Goldberg, and The Road To Freedom: How To Win The Fight For Free Enterprise, by Arthur Brooks — that I will review them here together in one fell swoop.

Citigroup vice chairman Peter Orszag, a former director of President Obama's Office of Management and Budget, has an article in the Summer issue of Democracy laying out a scenario for how the 2013 "fiscal cliff" or "taxmaggedon" will resolve: