Harvard economics professor Edward Glaeser has two pieces worth a look. A column at Bloomberg news discusses some of the differences between America and Europe:

I also believe that the case for economic freedom in the U.S. has been helped by the visible example of our most successful entrepreneurs, from Andrew Carnegie to Steve Jobs.

The dominance of the European aristocracy provided the old European left with convenient villains, people whose great wealth and power were guaranteed by birth and who seemed to do little to justify their luxuries.

By contrast, Carnegie and Jobs earned their billions with ingenuity and effort.

Politico (here) and the Columbia Journalism Review (here) have stories on the press accountability site NewsTransparency.com, recently launched by FutureOfCapitalism, LLC, which is the parent company of this site.

The apparent failure of the supercommittee to come up with spending cuts, along with what the next steps are, is the topic of my weekly column, which is up at Reason.com. Please check it out here.

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein's latest piece is up at the Hoover Institution's Web site:

Looked at from the vantage point of the original Constitution, ObamaCare should be dead on arrival. But the New Deal transformation of long-established Commerce Clause jurisprudence has introduced a set of unprincipled (but fine-grained) distinctions that turn the law into a mass of linguistic absurdities that should lead ordinary people to question the collective sanity of the legal profession. From the straightforward prose of the Commerce Clause, Judge Silberman concludes (accurately) that "[t]oday, the only recognized limitations are that (1) Congress may not regulate non-economic behavior based solely on an attenuated link to interstate commerce, and (2) Congress may not regulate intrastate economic behavior if its aggregate impact on interstate commerce is negligible."

The yoga clothing company Lululemon has "Who Is John Galt?" on the side of the shopping bags now in its stores. The company has a blog post explaining why: "the character John Galt encouraged all of the world's innovators and intelligent minds to go on strike from the increasingly controlling government in order to create a vacuum of brilliance, proving that independent creativity and free-will is critical for quality of life."

To judge by this account in today's New York Times, the scene at the Harvard-Yale game hasn't changed much since this account of it was written 20 years ago.

The New Yorker has a long piece that gets close to the bottom of Occupy Wall Street: "Like most of Occupy Wall Street's core organizers, P. is an anarchist, meaning that he is 'dedicated to the eradication of any unjust or illegitimate system. At the very least, that means the eradication of capitalism and the state.'...A mid-October balance sheet from the occupation's Finance Working Group reported that it had received four hundred and fifty thousand dollars in donations, which it was keeping in two accounts at Amalgamated Bank."

There's plenty to agree with or disagree with in Lawrence Summers' Financial Times column on income inequality, but this passage bears repeating: "On one side it is framed in zero-sum terms and the disappointing lack of income growth for middle-class workers is blamed on the success of the wealthy. Those with this view should ask themselves whether it would be better if the US had more entrepreneurs like those who founded Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook, or fewer. Each contributed significantly to rising inequality .... Where great fortunes are earned by providing great products or services that benefit large numbers of people, they should not be denigrated."

Warren Buffett, who has been running around complaining that the government should "stop coddling the super-rich" and should raise taxes, is reportedly suing the IRS to avoid $643 million in taxes that the government says Berkshire Hathaway's NetJets subsidiary owes the government for failing to collect ticket taxes from NetJets customers (who include Mr. Buffett himself). The suit against the IRS is filed by NetJets Large Aircraft Inc., not by Mr. Buffett himself, but Mr. Buffett is CEO of NetJet parent Berkshire and its largest individual shareholder.

Yuval Levin cautions opponents of ObamaCare against focusing too much on the Supreme Court and the constitutionality of the individual mandate. "That is an important secondary question, but it is not where the future of our health-care system will be decided," he writes. "The key problem is the overall concept—which begins from the premise that our system of health-care financing will only keep costs under control if the government becomes an even greater force in the health sector than it is now and proceeds to create a system that will cause premiums to rise rapidly in the individual market and create major dislocation in the employer market, driving people into vastly overregulated exchanges that would push premiums higher still, and then initiate a program of subsidies whose only real answer to the mounting costs of coverage will be to pay them with public dollars and so inflate them further. It aims to spend a trillion dollars on subsidies to large insurance companies and the expansion of an unreformed Medicaid system, to micromanage the insurance industry in ways likely to make it even less efficient, to cut Medicare benefits without using the money to shore up the program or reduce the deficit, and to raise taxes on employment, investment, and medical research."

James Pethokoukis has an interview with Paul Ryan: "our answer is upward mobility — not begrudging people who become successful, but making it easier for people to find success, to bring those rungs of the economic ladder within reach of people who've never scaled it before. Grow the pie versus redistribute slices of a shrinking pie. That's what our society has always prided itself on. That's the American system we've had...Instead of focusing on bringing the top down toward the bottom, let's focus on bringing the bottom up toward the top."

More: "Our tax system should not have as its primary, guiding principle redistribution. It should have growth as its primary principle so you can accelerate mobility. When you have a tax system aimed at redistribution and narrowing disparities, you end up slowing down growth and slowing down mobility."

The Wall Street Journal has an editorial and the Cato Institute's Daniel Mitchell has a column arguing that the automatic "sequester" spending cuts included in the debt-limit increase deal are a better option than a tax increase that might come out of the "Supercommittee."

The Drudge Report is linking to a neat Weekly Standard item about GE's zero-liability 2010 tax return being 57,000 pages long. There's a reference to "Ken Kies, a tax lawyer who represents GE." That's the same Ken Kies who was "Chief of Staff of the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation from January 1995 until January 1998" and who "From 1982 until 1987...served as Chief Republican Tax Counsel to the Ways and Means Committee of the United States House of Representatives." The revolving door turns again. The Weekly Standard also doesn't mention that GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt is chairman of President Obama's Presidential Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. Here's an idea to boost American competitiveness: simplify the tax code so companies don't feel the need to hire former congressional staffers to help with their 57,000-page tax return.

The Associated Press has coverage of a visit to Capitol Hill by Patriotic Millionaires for higher taxes. The article is among the "most popular" stories on Yahoo! News this morning. My favorite part is the response from the president of Americans for Tax Reform, Grover Norquist:

"If you think the federal government can spend your money better than you can, then by all means" pay more in taxes than you owe, said Grover Norquist, of Americans for Tax Reform, a group that has gotten almost all congressional Republicans to pledge to vote against tax hikes. The IRS should have a little line on the form where people can donate money to the government, he suggested, "just like the tip line on a restaurant receipt."

Mr. Norquist is so good at framing these issues. And I mean that without any sarcasm. He really is good at it.

"Sears Suffers as It Skimps on Stores" is the headline over a news article on the front of the marketplace section of today's Wall Street Journal.

From the article: "Mr. Lampert, who serves as company chairman and whose ESL Investments Inc. controls more than 60% of Sears shares, hasn't given a media interview in more than three years."

That's not accurate. The March 4, 2009 Wall Street Journal carried a column by Holman W. Jenkins Jr., a Wall Street Journal staffer, that includes the words, "Mr. Lampert tells me," along with quotes from Mr. Lampert. March 2009 is less than three years ago. It'd be one thing if the Journal missed an interview with some obscure publication. But this was an interview that Mr. Lampert gave to the Wall Street Journal.