Amity Shlaes has a Bloomberg View column reporting on a Bank of England study showing that growth was higher, inflation was lower, and banking crises were fewer when the Bretton Woods gold exchange standard was in effect.

President Clinton, writing in the New York Times, reviewing Robert Caro's The Passage of Power, says:

Caro paints a vivid picture of L.B.J.'s misery. We can feel Johnson's ambition ebb, and believe with him that his political life was over, as he was shut out of meetings, unwelcome on Air Force One, mistrusted and despised by Robert Kennedy.

NPR has an interview with Jonah Goldberg and an excerpt of his new book The Tyranny of Cliches.

Bloomberg News reports:

About 1,780 expatriates gave up their nationality at U.S. embassies last year, up from 235 in 2008, according to Andy Sundberg, secretary of Geneva's Overseas American Academy, citing figures from the government's Federal Register. The embassy in Bern, the Swiss capital, redeployed staff to clear a backlog as Americans queued to relinquish their passports....

During a 10-minute renunciation ceremony in a booth with bullet-proof glass windows, embassy staff ask exiting Americans whether they are acting voluntarily and understand the implications of giving up their passports. They pay a fee of $450 to renounce and may incur an "exit tax" on unrealized capital gains if their assets exceed $2 million or their average annual U.S. tax bill is more than $151,000 during the past five years.

They receive a certificate within three months, telling them they are no longer American citizens and entitled to the services and protection of the U.S. government.

From a Bloomberg News article quoting Thomas Piketty, a professor at the Paris School of Economics who favors a 75% tax in incomes above 1 million Euros:

"The idea that we need to pay people many millions of euros per year to get them to work harder is just crazy," Piketty said in a telephone interview.

The recent Secret Service scandal and Secret Service agent Clint Hill's new book Mrs. Kennedy and Me are the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at Reason.com here.

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein writes in his latest column, "How then to create desirable conditions for growth? The first key element is to focus on growth by calling off the acerbic attack on the top one percent." Around here we call that cost-free job-creating idea no. 29: change the tone.

The chair of the Philosophy Department of Yeshiva University, James Otteson, has a piece published by the Manhattan Institute on "The Moral Case for Capitalism." It takes the long view:

From a Boston Globe dispatch about the controversy in the Massachusetts Senate race over whether Elizabeth Warren listed herself as a Native American when she was applying for law professor jobs:

At the University of Texas where Warren taught from 1981 through 1987, a records coordinator said on Monday that computer records there list her ethnicity as "white."

Is this really what race relations on campus in this country have come to? That the colleges are keeping 30-year-old records on the race of their faculty members and disclosing them on an individual basis whenever a reporter calls up?

On the positive side for Professor Warren, if this whole Senate thing doesn't work out, she may have a leg up if she decides to apply for one of the casino licenses being granted by Governor Patrick.

A column sums things up:

The public likewise suspects that Obamacare will come to resemble the hated TSA they see at airports — lots of employees milling around, little guarantee that the job at hand is done well, and an evident resentment of federal employees toward the public they serve. Will X-rays for our kidneys resemble the sort of scanning process and pat-downs we endure at airports? And the more the government seems to take over private enterprise — the car bailouts, the mortgage industry, student loans, wind and solar partnerships — the more private enterprise is frightened of being the next small guitar company or the next Chrysler creditor. Government seems now to be not only incompetent but arrogant, as if its vast recent growth ensured its impunity from oversight — whether in the GSA scandal, the Secret Service debacle, or the Fast and Furious mess.

Rush Limbaugh does a good job taking apart the New York Times's article from over the weekend about Apple's taxes.

From Bill Clinton's remarks at a fundraiser last night for President Obama:

If you go back 500 years, whenever a country's financial system collapses, it takes between 5 and 10 years to get back to full employment. If you go back for the last 200 years, when buildings had been widely owned by individuals and companies, if there's a mortgage collapse it almost always takes 10 years.

The New York Times today carries an editorial criticizing the Romney campaign for naming Robert Bork as one of three chairmen of a "Justice Advisory Comittee." The Times writes that Judge Bork "once opposed integration of public accommodations by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, calling it 'unsurpassed ugliness.'"

The link the Times provides as evidence for that claim is not to anything written by Bork, but to a summary by the Senate Judiciary Committee, which, in 1987, was in the hands of a Democratic majority.

The Times itself once carried Bork's explanation of the 1963 article in The New Republic in which he used the term:

KENNEDY: Sure, I'll ask - ask the staff to get those. I mean, does -do you remember, or you don't remember, the use of words "a principle of unsurpassed ugliness"?

The pattern of the Obama administration backing down after some of its more extreme regulatory measures attract attention has been the subject of earlier coverage here. Examples include the mandatory automobile back-up camera rule, the ban of all cellphone use, even hands-free, while driving, the ban on 100 watt incandescent light bulbs, the NLRB's action preventing Boeing from opening a factory in South Carolina, a right-to-work state, and the IRS's cumbersome Form 1099 requirement as part of Obamacare. The latest example is that the Department of Labor has shelved its plan to ban children under 18 from helping with farm chores.

The libertarian non-profit law firm the Institute for Justice has a new case challenging the constitutionality of a 2009 Portland, Oregon law that imposed higher prices on limousine and sedan car service companies to protect the city's taxicab industry. , The IJ Web site reports:

Recently, the city's Revenue Bureau clamped down on Groupon.com promotions offered by two Portland limo and sedan companies, Towncar.com and Fiesta Limousine. When the companies offered discounted fares to their customers—$32 one-way trips to the airport or up to 30 miles elsewhere in Portland—city enforcers immediately threatened the companies with a combined $895,000 in fines and suspension of their operating permits. In response to the controversy, the city has publicly stated that its job is to protect taxicab companies from competition by enforcing anti-consumer rules.

A Youtube video about the case is embedded below.