A post here yesterday pointed out a discrepancy between the Wall Street Journal, which said the SEC issues about 60 confidentiality waivers per quarter to investors, and the New York Times, which, paraphrasing a spokesman, said the agency gets about 60 such requests a year. The Times has since corrected its story to 60 a quarter.

Governor and Presidential Candidate Rick Perry's Washington reform plan, rolled out yesterday, is the third big policy plank of his campaign, after energy and tax. It didn't get all that much press attention, but it's worth a look, both for its diagnosis of the problem and for its suggestions on potential solutions. There's a great "federal spending explosion" chart reporting that "one day of federal spending today now equals total 1940 spending" and "federal spending today is six times greater than it was in 1980." The erosion of the value of the dollar is part of that story, but not the whole story, either.

The debate over means-testing Medicare or Social Security benefits, so that higher-income or higher-asset people would get less, has been the subject of a series of posts here (see for example, here, here, here, and here). Now a Bloomberg News headline takes the means-testing argument to an entirely new level: "Taxpayers Billed for Millionaires' Kids at Charter School."

Here's a 48-minute video of Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, interviewed by Politico's Mike Allen this morning. Says Mr. Rubio: "We don't need two Democrat parties. We already have one....There has to be a voice for limited government in America."

Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times beat me by about two hours last night in getting to the point about the SEC-granted waivers from public disclosure that allowed Warren Buffett to accumulate $10.7 billion worth of IBM stock for Berkshire Hathaway in secret. Mr. Sorkin even, to his credit, asked Mr. Buffett about the issue. From the Sorkin column:

Mr. Buffett, in an interview, asked me, "How would you feel if you had to announce every story idea you had?"

He said that he did not believe that public investors should always be allowed to piggyback on investment ideas made by professional investors, especially before they are finished buying.

Business Insider has a report about Peter Schweizer's new book Throw Them All Out: How Politicians and Their Friends Get Rich Off Insider Stock Tips, Land Deals, and Cronyism That Would Send the Rest of Us To Prison. The Business Insider article is headlined, "Book: Rahm Emanuel Dumped Tons of Freddie Mac Stock Days Before It Collapsed." The article says, "lawmakers are exempted from the insider trading laws they impose on private traders."

Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, and Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, have together introduced the American Growth, Recovery, Empowerment and Entrepreneurship Act, or AGREE Act. The bill builds on both Cost-Free Job-Creating Idea No. 27, "Fix immigration in a way that opens the door wider to more legal immigrants" and Cost-Free Job-Creating Idea No. 5, "Repeal the regulatory burdens of Sarbanes Oxley for all companies with less than $1 billion in sales, and index that number to inflation."

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein has a new piece up at the Hoover Institution Web site about a legal challenge to the FDA's gory new cigarette-package warning levels. He suggests an alternative approach:

The United States should promptly cut to zero the near $200 million in tobacco subsidies that it shelled out in 2010. In addition, it should take smoking into account in determining premiums for Medicare, and make it perfectly clear that all insurance companies are entitled to charge extra fees, if they so choose, to tobacco smokers. The correct regime here, as in so many other cases, is to remove both the undeserved subsidies along with the excessive regulations and tort liability. As a nation, we would have been a lot better off in dealing with the dangers of tobacco by adopting a minimalist four-part program: no tort liability; no Master Settlement Agreement; no FDA regulatory barrage, coupled, perhaps, with the set of tobacco warnings first adopted in the 1960s.

Some school districts are moving beyond school lunches and school breakfasts to free school dinners. The Memphis Commercial Appeal reports: "As part of Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids legislation passed in 2010, the federal government is now in the supper business, budgeting $641 million over 10 years to make sure children in the nation's ever-growing poor pockets get one more balanced meal a day." Rush Limbaugh notes that the reporter who wrote the Memphis Commercial Appeal article: "didn't go out and find anybody who thought this was a bad idea, didn't find one contrary or contrarian opinion. I mean, I guess the pretense in journalism is now off. It used to be that you'd at least pay lip service to people who disagree with the primary premise of your story. Now to hell with it. If you're gonna have dinner at the Memphis schools, everybody loves it, don't even try to find somebody who disagrees with it because it's not worth the time."

NPR, following yesterday's piece on Ayn Rand, has another today devoted to Friedrich Hayek.

A Wall Street Journal news article on Warren Buffett's disclosure that he has spent $10.7 billion accumulating a 5.4% stake in IBM for Berkshire Hathaway reports, "Berkshire secretly had been accumulating the shares since March, twice receiving confidential treatment from the Securities and Exchange Commission, which otherwise mandates that big investors disclose their holdings quarterly....The SEC issues about 60 confidentiality waivers per quarter to investors, allowing them to accumulate shares without disclosures that could drive up stock prices."

My weekly column is about the christening of the United States Naval Ship Medgar Evers, named after the slain civil rights leader. Please check it out at the New York Sun (here) or at Reason.com (here). The two books mentioned in the column are The Autobiography of Medgar Evers and Adam Nossiter's Of Long Memory: Mississippi and the Murder of Medgar Evers.

During his three-hour appearance on CNBC Monday morning, Warren Buffett mentioned a point marked here the other day. Asked why the Federal Reserve didn't stop MF Global from betting on European debt, he said: "to some extent, they're making the same mistake that regulators have made all over the world about sovereign debt. Sovereign debt is pretty generally regarded as risk-free, and that's why the European banks loaded up on it. They didn't have to count it for capital requirements, and it was a way they could leverage up further without having the leverage rules called into play. ... the regulators in my view were very lax in terms of just regarding all sovereign debt as terrific, even when the spread started widening out."

This site is often critical of Mr. Buffett, but that particular point sounds about right.

NPR has a big piece on Ayn Rand. It quotes her from a 1959 interview complaining about the similarities between Democrats and Republicans:

"Both parties today are for socialism, in effect — for controls. And there is no party, there are no voices, to offer an actual pro-capitalist, laissez-faire, economic freedom and individualism," she said. "That is what this country needs today."

And then NPR opines: "If Rand were alive today, she might be pleased to see that, more and more, Americans do have that choice. And her ideas are alive and well-represented in the U.S. Capitol."

From a news article in Bloomberg:

Berlusconi presented his resignation last night to President Giorgio Napolitano after the Parliament in Rome approved measures to spur growth and reduce the euro-area's second-biggest debt....His economic policy will initially focus on cutting debt, before seeking to revive expansion in an economy where growth has lagged behind the euro-region average for more than a decade, la Repubblica reported today, without saying where it got the information....Monti is considering resurrecting a property tax on first homes that was abolished by Berlusconi, introducing a wealth tax and speeding up asset sales, the newspaper said. He will follow with an overhaul of labor-market laws that could make it easier for companies to fire workers...He's been an international adviser to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. for six years.