The Boston Globe's Alex Beam has a column about local governments resisting excessive government regulation of locally produced food:

Roughly a year ago, Sedgwick, Maine, enacted a "Local Food and Community Self-Governance Ordinance." Invoking the Declaration of Independence and the Maine Constitution, the ordinance declared that "Sedgwick citizens possess the right to produce, process, sell, purchase, and consume local foods of their choosing. . . . We hold that federal and state regulations impede local food production and constitute a usurpation of our citizens' right to foods of their choice."

Soon after, several other Maine towns followed suit. The contagion spread to two towns in Vermont and, improbably, to Los Angeles County, population 9.8 million. The County's Board of Supervisors is considering a "Resolution recognizing the rights of individuals to grow and consume their own food and to enter into private contracts with other individuals to board animals for food."

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein's latest weekly column is about how the federal government is using its grants to higher education to apply "unconstitutional conditions" that attempt to force universities like Yale to handle sexual harassment complaints in certain ways.

Professor Epstein is always interesting to read, but on this one I think he leaves a couple of points underexplored. First, one wonders if Yale, left to its own devices and without federal government pressure, would do any better adjudicating these complaints, or if the professors and administrators, even on their own, would come at it from pretty much the same perspective as the federal bureaucrats. Second, if the whole situation is partly a consequence of the vastness of the federal funds flowing to the higher education sector, maybe that money flow is worth taking a closer look at, too, in terms of the history of it and the advantages and disadvantages of it. One place to begin would be here.

The New York Giants Super Bowl victory and what it tells us about the fallibility of "experts" is the subject of my weekly column this week. Please check it out at the New York Post (here), the New York Sun (here) or Reason.com (here). Or check it out in all three places, if you wish. If you don't care about football, you can read it for the sections that are about Mark Zandi and David Leonhardt.

Four Democrats in the House of Representatives are backing a bill that would authorize the president to set up a "reasonable profits board" to determine what reasonable profits are for oil and gas companies, and then go on to impose taxes of 50% to 100% on amounts beyond the "reasonable" level. The Blaze and The Hill have details, and National Review and the New York Post have also taken note. This legislation doesn't look like it's moving anywhere at the moment (two of the original six co-sponsors have withdrawn their support), but it's newsworthy as an illumination of how certain elements — Congressmen John Conyers, Dennis Kucinich, Bob Filner, Lynn Woolsey — on the left think.

The Superbowl will be played in a stadium largely financed by the taxpayers of Indianapolis, Bloomberg View points out in an editorial that reports, "Public funding for sports stadiums has been found, in dozens of studies over several decades, to fall short of its promised benefits and to cost taxpayers more than expected." The editorial also says, "the economic rationale for publicly financing stadiums is poor," suggesting that stadium subsidies be approved only after public referendums.

This is interesting coming from Bloomberg, which is majority owned by Michael Bloomberg, the same man who as mayor wanted to subsidize a stadium for the Jets on the West Side of Manhattan as part of an effort to attract the Olympics to New York City. The CEO and president of Bloomberg is Daniel Doctoroff, who led the stadium push when he was deputy mayor.

It's a sign that the regulatory burdens facing small businesses have gotten genuinely excessive when even the New York Times news department — and even the New York Times news department's non-profit, San Francisco Bay Area-based content partner — finds them newsworthy. The paper today features a San Francisco ice cream shop that took two years to get permission from the city to open:

Ms. Pries said she had to endure months of runaround and pay a lawyer to determine whether her location (a former grocery, vacant for years) was eligible to become a restaurant. There were permit fees of $20,000; a demand that she create a detailed map of all existing area businesses (the city didn't have one); and an $11,000 charge just to turn on the water.

Most of the obstacles seem to be locally imposed, a reminder that all the talk by Republican presidential candidates about devolving power to state and local governments from the federal level doesn't always translate into improvement for entrepreneurs.

From a Wall Street Journal article on Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett posing for weird photos with visiting students that he requires to be at least one-third female: "As for the principles that made him the world's most famous investor, he reminds students to 'stay away from borrowed money....'"

Berkshire has $60 billion in debt, according to Yahoo! Finance, while among Berkshire's largest stock investments, American Express has $63 billion in debt and Coca-Cola has $29 billion in debt.

Spirit Airlines is so annoyed at a costly new Department of Transportation regulation that it has slapped a $2 fee on passengers and called it the DOTUC fee, for "Department of Transportation Unintended Consequences." A Reuters dispatch and a Spirit airlines press release have details. From the press release, headlined "New Regulation Costs Consumers Millions Each Year":

The U.S. Department of Transportation's new supposedly "consumer friendly" regulation requiring airlines to hold fares for 24 hours after booking without penalty comes with unintended consequences and is costing consumers millions.

To cover the costs of this misguided and expensive regulation, Spirit (Nasdaq:SAVE) is introducing the $2 DOTUC fee. The $2 fee to cover the unintended consequences of government regulations goes into effect on Tuesday, January 31, 2012.

USA Today has an editorial on the recession-related rise in disabled Americans, which we highlighted in earlier posts on this site here and here. The USA Today piece moves the story forward by highlighting the role of lawyers in the Social Security Disability Insurance system. Recipients of the benefits have jumped by 20% in the past 5 years, the USA Today article says. The article mentions the boom in Social Security law firms specializing in getting people disability benefits and reports, "The system is so inefficient that applicants commonly have to wait two years for a decision, prompting them to hire lawyers. Those lawyers typically are paid a percentage of the backpay successful applicants get to cover the time between their claim and the decision. This gives the lawyers a potent incentive to drag the process out, to the detriment of everyone but themselves." Walter Olson? Jim Copland? Take it away.

Amity Shlaes has a nifty Bloomberg View column about Andrew Mellon, the wealthy Treasury secretary under Calvin Coolidge who in 1926 succeeded in getting the top individual income tax rate cut to 25% from 46%. "Federal revenue increased after each rate cut," she says.

"Stringer Calls for Tax Cut" is the headline that the Wall Street Journal put over an article about a plan by the Manhattan Borough president, Scott Stringer, a Democrat who is a potential New York City mayoral candidate in 2013, to raise taxes overall by $23 million a year by slapping New Yorkers who earn $10 million a year or more with a 10% increase in their city income taxes, offset in part by small tax reductions for lower earners. I'm fond of the folks at the Journal's New York section, many of whom are my former colleagues, and this is a newsworthy topic about which the facts are all there in the article and the accompanying graphic if you dig down deep enough. But the headline shows the power of the press to frame an issue. One headline writer can turn what looks to me (even though I earn a lot less than $10 million a year) like a tax increase into a headline about a tax cut.

When conservatives argue that capital is mobile, and that raising taxes in America will send rich Americans overseas, liberals often answer skeptically. They admit that raising state tax rates may cause rich people to move to other states. But picking up and leaving America seems more dramatic, not only for patriotic reasons, but even financially, because when you do it the IRS makes you pay taxes on all your capital gains, even those that would be considered unrealized if you stayed in America. The New York Times reported last year that the number of Americans leaving skyrocketed in 2010 and 2011. The latest data point, my former colleague Josh Gerstein reports at Politico, is oil heiress Anna Getty, a self-described libertarian who has apparently decamped to Italy from Los Angeles.

One point I haven't yet seen in the avalanche of coverage of the Facebook initial public offering is that, at a valuation for the company of $75 billion to $100 billion, the Securities and Exchange Commission really didn't do American citizens any favors back in January of 2011 when it basically forced Goldman Sachs to allow only foreign investors, not Americans, to invest in a private round of capital raising that reportedly valued the company at about $50 billion. In the name of "protecting" American investors, the American government prevented American citizens from making an investment that looks like it increased in value by between 50% and 100% in slightly more than a year. Foreigners who lacked the SEC's "protection" were able to enjoy those gains. Not exactly the SEC's finest hour.

Mitt Romney manages to step on his own momentum coming out of Florida with this comment:

I'm in this race because I care about Americans. I'm not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I'll fix it. I'm not concerned about the very rich, they're doing just fine. I'm concerned about the very heart of the America, the 90, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling

Asked a follow-up, he said:

The Wall Street Journal has an editorial on the national debt, asserting, "a series of non-stimulative tax cuts—tax rebates in 2008 and 2009, and payroll tax holidays in 2011 and this year—have depleted the Treasury with little economic benefit. These tax cuts don't change the incentive at the margin to work or invest, and they thus have little feedback effect in revenues from faster growth."

Back in December of 2010, when the newly elected House majority forced the payroll tax cut through, the Journal editorialists had modulated praise for it, writing at the time: