Arnold Kling has some thoughts about the Koch brothers' lawsuit over the control of the Cato Institute, including this: "Think tanks, like universities, may be ripe for disintermediation. Although I think my writing for Cato helped my personal brand, I would rather be viewed as an independent scholar. I view scholars as personal brands, and I do not think that affiliation with a think tank adds anything to their personal brands."

India, the world's second-largest exporter of cotton, has banned all exports of the fiber, effective immediately, BBC reports.

This is a reminder that democracy, economic freedom, and the rule of law are all different things — especially since the ban apparently means even existing contracts to export cotton will be abrogated.

The largest exporter of cotton is China. It'd be interesting to see how a President Romney would handle this situation in view of his threats to impose punitive trade sanctions on China.

In the meantime, get ready for more clothes made out of hemp, polyester, wool, or Egyptian cotton.

Bloomberg News has released the first of what it says will be a daily updated list of the world's 20 richest people. One thing that struck me is that for all the talk of how the economy has become excessively skewed toward financial services, there doesn't seem to be a single banker or hedge fund manager on the list. The closest is probably Warren Buffett, who owns insurance and reinsurance companies and a lot of bank stocks, and who operates a kind of financial holding company, but whose company also owns and manages a lot of businesses like See's Candies and Dairy Queen.

Harvard economics professor Gregory Mankiw writes in his New York Times column about taxation of carried interest, giving some examples to show that it's not always so easy to tell what is ordinary income or what is a capital gain.

The Washington Post, in which Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway is a significant investor, has an interview with Warren Buffett's grandson Howard W. Buffett in which Howard W. Buffett mentions in passing, "when I left the White House." Sure enough, Wikipedia reports that Howard W. Buffett served in the Obama administration, first in the department of agriculture, and then in the Executive Office of the President of the United States.

It's not Howard W. Buffett's fault who his grandfather is, of course, and his last name shouldn't stop him from taking government jobs for which he is qualified. But the whole thing is news to me, even though I follow relations between Mr. Buffett and President Obama pretty closely. It's just one more little fact to file away in the web of relationships between Mr. Buffett and President Obama.

Some time in the very early days of the New York Sun, maybe even before we started publishing, James Q. Wilson ventured down to Lower Manhattan and had an un-fancy lunch in a cramped nearby restaurant with a few of the editors. He was interested in writing for us, it turned out. He explained that he was shy, so we might have to call or email him.

It was actually one of the more thrilling moments in the run of a newspaper that had a lot of thrilling moments, because Wilson, by that time, which was 2002, was a very big deal.

He was best known for the Broken Windows article he published in the March 1982 Atlantic Monthly, which he co-authored with George Kelling. I had encountered the article as a Harvard undergraduate cross-registered into Professor Kelling's Kennedy School of Government course on policing, which was terrific. The article is deservedly credited for helping to bring about sharp reductions in crime in New York City and elsewhere.

Further to our earlier posts Who Are the Unemployed? and More on 'Who Are the Unemployed' comes an article by Paul Roitman Bardack in the Spring 2012 issue (not yet available online) of CJ, the magazine of Conservative Judaism:

I found myself unemployed...we were able to sell our house quickly and at a good price...we tried to turn our lemon into lemonade by embarking on our three month trip of a lifetime...And so our adventure began...we started our journey in British Columbia...We did a lot of hiking, including to a folk concert that seemed to have attracted every aging hippie in Canada.

Stops in Seattle, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Philadelphia, New York City, Columbus, Kentucky, rural Tennessee, and "boating in Maine" followed.

The Boston Globe reports that the federal government has sent checks of up to $500 to 500 Boston-area fishermen "in return for relinquishing their saltwater fishing licenses for a year. It's part of a study to measure the economic value of recreational saltwater fishing."

I'm thinking of a conducting a study in which I send checks to government bureaucrats offering them money not to spend taxpayer dollars on this sort of thing.

Courtesy of Jim Romenesko comes this view into the mindset of the top three editors of the New York Times, Jill Abramson, Dean Baquet, and John Geddes, as expressed in their message to their staff about union negotiations: "The New York Times stands almost alone in being able to offer talented journalists a promising and fulfilling career."

The subtext is that the Times is the only game in town, and that the employees there should be happy with whatever they are offered, because they don't have many other good other options. There may be a grain of truth in that — I said as much in an earlier post here on the Times negotiations with the union, when I wrote that the protesting Times employees "should feel lucky they still have jobs" — but surely there's a way to make that point without disparaging competing news organizations.

Bloomberg Businessweek has a piece under the headline "The Warren Buffett Haters Club," mistakenly characterizing as "haters" some people who disagree with Mr. Buffett's call to raise some taxes. If there were a "Warren Buffett Lovers Club" of those who blindly agree with whatever Mr. Buffett says while ignoring his hypocrisy or the facts of the matter, it might just include some journalists.

MIT's Tech Review reports: "Abound Solar, which makes cadmium telluride thin-film solar panels, and had been awarded a $400 million conditional loan guarantee by the U.S. Department of Energy, announced yesterday that it is stopping production at its 65-megawatt factory in Colorado and laying off 180 workers."

Along with most of the rest of the center-right I've been sympathetic to efforts by the builders of the Keystone XL oil pipeline to win approval from the Obama administration. Somehow I'd missed the fact that there's an eminent domain angle. NPR reports on a Nebraska landowner who says that TransCanada sent his 92-year-old grandmother a letter threatening to use the power of eminent domain to build the pipeline across their property, and KYTX of Longview, Texas, reports on a Texas landowner who is suing to try to stop her land from being taken by eminent domain for the project.

If free market advocates are going to be consistent on this one, they may want to defend Keystone's right to build the pipeline without being stopped by the government, but also the landowners' rights to be paid a market-clearing price for the use of their property without being forced by the government to surrender the land for the benefit of a private company.

Great news for all those who were hoping that New York's financial sector would shrink (not a hope I share). New York State comptroller Thomas DiNapoli reports:

"Cash bonuses were down in 2011, reflecting a difficult year on Wall
Street," DiNapoli said. "Profits were down sharply and securities firms
in New York City resumed downsizing in the second half of the year. The
securities industry, which is a critical component of the economies of
New York City and New York State, faces continued challenges as it works
through the fallout from the financial crisis and adjusts to regulatory
reforms."

The Comptroller also estimates that profits for the broker/dealer
operations of New York Stock Exchange member firms, the traditional
measure of profitability for the securities industry, did not exceed
$13.5 billion in 2011, which would be less than half of the $27.6
billion earned in 2010. This would be the second year in a row that
profits dropped by more than half.

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein's latest weekly column is up at the Hoover Institution's Web site. It's about Europe, austerity, Paul Krugman, and the "safety net." He writes, "Draghi's candid admission of the European model's defeat illustrates the danger in social safety nets. These can cushion individuals from shock in the short run, but the balance is not sustainable in the long run. Too many people climb into the nets, leaving too few productive individuals to support them."

I'm actually okay with a safety net, but it's got to be a net, not a pillow-top mattress with 1000-thread-count sheets, and there should be a ladder from it back up to the high wire.

The Harvard Crimson today has an editorial opposing an effort by "Harvard's own Institute of Politics Tobacco Control Policy Group" to ban smoking in Harvard Yard. I clicked through expecting some robust libertarianism, but what I got instead was some wan utilitarianism mixed with egalitarianism: "As we all know, Cambridge is not the safest off-campus environment, and enforcing a ban on smoking will inevitably place students' safety in jeopardy by driving them toward potentially dangerous locales and privileging students who have access to off-campus locations where smoking is permitted."

Maybe the college could ban smoking in the Yard but give the smokers guns with which to defend themselves on the perilous public sidewalks of Harvard Square?