My column this week looks at some of the variations in unemployment rates in the states, and links them to income tax rates. Please check it out at Reason.com here and at the New York Sun here.

There have been so many pro-capitalism books by television news personalities in the past few years — Michelle Caruso-Cabrera's You Know I'm Right: More Prosperity, Less Government, Joe Kernen and Blake Kernan's Your Teacher Said What?! Trying to Raise a Fifth Grade Capitalist in Obama's America —  that when John Stossel's No They Can't: Why Government Fails — But Individuals Succeed crossed my desk, I approached it with a certain weariness. 

Mr. Stossel is great, don't get me wrong. The more television news personalities stand up for capitalism, the better. A dozen of them could write books, and they would still be a beleaguered minority. But is there anything for a reader already on the capitalist side to learn from yet another one of these books?

Yes there is. Mr. Stossel's book turns out to be quite well done. Two of the best pieces of content in the book are charts. One shows the decline in workplace fatalities per 100,000 workers between 1933 and 2005. The chart shows that "before regulation, deaths dropped just as fast." Or, as Mr. Stossel puts it, the establishment of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration "made no difference" in workplace fatalities.

This lawsuit involving replacement car keys for Volkswagens is really something, even by the absurd standards of American class action litigation. Lawyers get nearly $500,000, "victims" get nothing. The case is Jacob Glasser v. Volkswagen of America, Inc.

The Associated Press manages to write 600 words about the mayor-elect of Sunland Park, New Mexico, Daniel Salinas — "Alcohol, padded expense reports, prostitutes and kickbacks. Those are some the latest charges filed in New Mexico against the mayor-elect of the troubled border town" —without mentioning his political party affiliation. It's relevant not only as standard background information on a politician, but because Mr. Salinas' lawyer claims prosecutors are singling out Mr. Salinas for attack because he is a Democrat.

The New York Post's Annie Karni, a former colleague of mine at the New York Sun, does a pretty good job of highlighting the absurd excesses of New York City's landmarks preservation commission, which has designated a BP gas station — the old Gaseteria at Lafayette and Houston streets — as a historic landmark.

Let anyone without a lot of political clout with City Hall beware: the value of property in this city can be dramatically reduced by government action. The Bloomberg administration has expanded landmark districts, but the legal point was lost here long before Mr. Bloomberg became mayor, in 1978, in the case Penn Central Transportation Co. v. New York City.

Earlier coverage of the New York Landmarks Commission on this site is here and here.

For his February report on the January employment situation, Politico Morning Money's Ben White led off with a gloomy prediction:

A California judge, Richard Kramer, has dismissed the case brought by Monet Parham, a California Department of Public Health employee who had sued to try to get McDonald's to stop advertising Happy Meal toys. Looks like a victory for individual responsibility and free choice, and for McDonald's, which, to its credit, fought the suit rather than caving or settling as some other companies might have done in a similar situation.

Peggy Noonan gets a Wall Street Journal column out of President Kennedy's response to the Engel v. Vitale ruling, which we wrote about here back in February 2010 when it was campaign finance law rather than ObamaCare before the Supreme Court. Good column.

Caroline Baum has a Bloomberg View column about President Obama's criticism of oil company profits. She writes, "Why pick on oil and gas companies, which already pay an effective tax rate of more than 40 percent? ...Singling out specific industries as scapegoats for his political purposes doesn't strike me as particularly fair."

Here we had thought, silly us, that the Justice Department's antitrust division was supposed to intervene, if at all, in favor of competitive markets, not against them. Now it looks like one possible outcome of the Justice Department's antitrust involvement in the electronic book market, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, is that Apple "could exit the market." Since right now Apple's iPad is a big player in an ebook market that consists of Amazon's Kindle, Barnes & Noble's Nook, and some other smaller players like Sony and Kobo, any government-enforced settlement that led to Apple getting out of the business would mean less competition, not more. That's bad for authors, of which I am one. And long-run, it's probably bad for readers, too.

NPR is doing a series on the history of Silicon Valley. So far, it's pretty good. Today's installment is here and an earlier installment is here.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon is out with his annual letter to shareholders, and, as usual, it's an interesting read. To me the most interesting parts were his defense of big business and the section on regulation and his company's compliance costs.

On big business:

There are huge misunderstandings about job creation in the United States — and these misunderstandings frequently lead to misguided policy....We often read that small business is the primary driver of new jobs — this is both incorrect and overly simplistic. Sometimes those net new jobs appear in small businesses, and sometimes they appear in large businesses. In fact, recent studies show that large companies generally are more stable over time and that their employment goes down less during recessions....

The Washington Free Beacon has a piece on the posters in the elevator at the U.S. Department of Labor, which feature the labor secretary, Hilda Solis, marching arm-in-arm with the Rev. Al Sharpton.

...in 1976 when he called the US income tax "a disgrace to the human race." So writes columnist Jeff Jacoby in a tax-season column.

This drama unfolding over judicial review in connection with President Obama's comments on ObamaCare is really something. I don't necessarily fault President Obama for trying to do all he can to make sure the judicial branch doesn't undo what he and the legislative branch did on health care, and personally I'd prefer that the law be overturned or repealed by Congress rather than by a court, but I don't fault judge Jerry Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit for trying to defend the judicial branch's prerogatives, either. Remember, this is the same president who in his 2010 State of the Union address denounced the robed justices who were sitting there in front of him for their decision in a campaign finance law case.