Time to adjust the inflation barometer again, says a Bloomberg View editorial.

The editors think inflation is OVERestimated. In reality, if we used the same barometer as during the Volcker era, we'd see rates around 10 percent, according to this CNBC article.

Shadowstats puts the rate at 10.3 percent.

The American Institute for Economic Research puts the rate at 8 percent.

Mayor Bloomberg made some pretty good points in his message explaining why he will veto the New York City Council's efforts to impose higher minimum wages on some businesses. Highlights:

Those bills – the so-called living and prevailing wage bills – are a throwback to the era when government viewed the private sector as a cash cow to be milked, rather than a garden to be cultivated.

In those days, government took the private sector for granted. We cannot afford to go back to those days. We cannot take our economy for granted. And I will not sign legislation – no matter how well-intended – that that hurts job creation and taxpayers.

And that's why I will veto both the living and prevailing wage bills. But before I do, I wanted to explain the principles guiding my decision....

The New Republic has an article about a billionaire who is a big donor to Republican political groups, Harold Simmons. It describes him as "reclusive." My authoritative Webster's Second Unabridged dictionary describes reclusive as someone living in reclusion, in "solitary confinement" or "secluded" from the world like a "monk or hermit." This does not seem to accurately describe Mr. Simmons, who was recently pictured in the Wall Street Journal alongside his wife. But reporters seem to have taken license to describe anyone who refuses to grant them an interview for the article they are working on as "reclusive."

From a New York Times article on the Massachusetts Senate race:

The Brown campaign has already tried to use Ms. Warren's Harvard salary — about $431,000 from January 2010 through December 2011, according to her disclosure form — as proof that she is an out-of-touch elitist. Ms. Warren, a longtime consumer advocate, has campaigned as a champion of the middle class and said that corporations and the wealthy unfairly get to play by a different set of rules.

On Monday, when Ms. Warren criticized a planned doubling of interest rates on student loans subsidized by the government, known as Stafford loans, the Brown campaign shot back that her annual salary as a Harvard professor would cover a year of tuition for "more than nine full-time students" there.

Lobbying by NetJets, a subsidiary of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, for a tax break worth $83 million over four years is the subject of a Wall Street Journal article.

From Mitt Romney's victory speech last night:

When it comes to the character of America, President Obama and I have very different visions.

Government is at the center of his vision. It dispenses the benefits, borrows what it cannot take, and consumes a greater and greater share of the economy. With Obamacare fully installed, government will come to control half the economy, and we will have effectively ceased to be a free enterprise society.

This President is putting us on a path where our lives will be ruled by bureaucrats and boards, commissions and czars. He's asking us to accept that Washington knows best – and can provide all.

We've already seen where this path leads. It erodes freedom. It deadens the entrepreneurial spirit. And it hurts the very people it's supposed to help. Those who promise to spread the wealth around only ever succeed in spreading poverty. Other nations have chosen that path. It leads to chronic high unemployment, crushing debt, and stagnant wages.

The Obama Administration is readying a new federal regulation that would prevent anyone under 18 from helping out on their family farm, the Daily Caller reports.

Rush Limbaugh talked today about the New York Times journalists' pension video that was featured here back on April 18. The whole Rush transcript is worth reading for those laboring under the mis-impression that Mr. Limbaugh is some kind of anti-intellectual. He spends part of the show praising a column by Michael Barone, who has degrees from Harvard and Yale Law School, and also praises the blog of Walter Russell Mead, a professor at Bard and a Yale graduate.

President Obama's college tour of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, the University of Colorado-Boulder, and the University of Iowa is the subject of my weekly column.

Just as high school juniors and their parents are touring college campuses to decide where to apply, President Obama is embarking on a college tour of his own.

Taxpayers, alas, may experience the same trepidation that the parents of the high school juniors do: this is going to cost us.

Please check the column out at Reason here and at Newsmax here.

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein's new column is up at the Hoover Institution Web site. It's about the Americans With Disabilities Act:

To this day, I recall an incident that occurred years ago at the University of Chicago. The occasion was the dedication of the new law school clinic building. A woman attendee with a broken leg was seated in a wheel chair when our group came to a set of steps next to which was a chairlift that no one had the key to and which no one knew how to operate. The solution was easy enough. Three or four of us picked up the woman in her wheelchair and carried her down the steps.

Jim Cramer is now known as a former hedge fund manager with degrees from Harvard and Harvard Law School, the host of CNBC's "Mad Money." But he spent six months in California living in his car with no driver's license, no home address, expired Florida license plates, and an unregistered handgun in the glove compartment.

Mr. Cramer's distinctly unglamorous roots were the subject of a talk he gave Saturday at the annual alumni lunch in Cambridge of the Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper. The financial journalist recalled his days at Harvard and his early work as a crime reporter, and he also had some advice to those seeking careers in the news business.

One of these days a smart prosecutor is going to see the opportunity to make an important point and bring a criminal charge against an athlete like Ron Artest, or "Metta World Peace" as he now calls himself, for taking a shot like the one he took last night, as shown in this YouTube video.

The May 7 Forbes has a cover on ObamaCare billionaires, and includes a piece on the CEO of health-care information technology firm Epic Systems, Judith Faulkner, whose wealth Forbes estimates at $1.7 billion. FutureOfCapitalism readers may recall Ms. Faulkner from our November 2009 article, The Bloomberg of Electronic Medical Records.

The Village Voice has been doing some tough reporting on highly compensated executives at non-profit organizations that are big government contractors.

"Mitt Romney, American Parasite" is the headline the Seattle Weekly put on its article about Mitt Romney's record at Bain Capital. It quotes an author who describes Mr. Romney as "a parasitic capitalist." The complaint seems to be that some jobs and benefits were cut at some companies Mr. Romney or Bain took over, while Mr. Romney and Bain made money. But the article doesn't seem to consider the possibility that without Mr. Romney or Bain, even more jobs and benefits would have been lost. Nor does it consider the voluntary nature of the transactions between the sellers of the companies and Bain Capital, or between Bain and its investors. Earlier posts here have focused on the sordid history of this "parasitic" accusation. If a businessman who makes money by turning around companies is a parasite, what does that make a reporter who makes money by writing about the businessman? If Mr. Romney can counter these sorts of assaults by successfully explaining why these transactions are good rather than parasitical, he'll do the country a great service even if he doesn't manage to win the election.