Peter Thiel, the Pay Pal founder who was in the news for giving money to encourage entrepreneurs to skip college, is also reportedly backing the Seasteading Institute, which was founded by Patri Friedman, a grandson of Milton Friedman. The Institute promotes plans to build artificial libertarian islands, like oil rigs or big cruise ships. The Frequently Asked Questions section on the Seasteading Web site is pretty great: "Why not just buy an island or part of a third-world country?" and "What about Hurricanes?"

The Yahoo! News article on the phenomenon, which is headlined, "Silicon Valley billionaire funding creation of artificial libertarian islands," reports:

The Wall Street Journal has an editorial and the New York Times has a bunch of letters to the editor, some of which are pretty good. On some level the whole discussion of raising taxes on the super-rich is a distraction from the actual work of reckoning with the debt and deficit problems. The government could confiscate the entire net worth of every billionaire in the country, according to Forbes, and it would have $1.4 trillion, assuming that none of them fled the country with their assets. That's a little less than 10% of our national debt, or a little more than a year's worth of just the deficit spending at the current levels, or less than half of the annual cost of all the government's spending. Even if one wanted to risk the confidence-destroying and incentive-destroying effects of such an assault on private property rights, the payoff wouldn't really be that much. A year later, we'd still have a trillion-dollar deficit and $13 trillion or $14 trillion in debt, but there wouldn't be any billionaires left to argue about raising taxes on.

More evidence that politicians on both sides of the aisle surrender to the tax-and-spend impulse: Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel, both politicians from right of center parties, announced today they would propose a tax on financial transactions. What a way to send a message to global capital to go somewhere else. Stock prices fell immediately after the announcement. It's almost enough to make a person think that France and Germany would be better off with left-wing parties in power. If they proposed an idea like this, the right would oppose it and try to block it. If it actually gets implemented, look for President Obama to try to copy it here, a la European-style universal health insurance.

The rebuttals to Warren Buffett's New York Times op-ed are starting to pile up: Bernard Goldberg, the Cato Institute's Tad DeHaven, the Cato Institute's Daniel Mitchell; the Tax Foundation's David Logan, the Washington Examiner's Timothy Carney. There's more to say on this. It's important, because if Republicans lose the presidency and the House in 2012 President Obama will probably take it as a mandate to implement some of Mr. Buffett's ideas on raising taxes, some of which have already been passed into law as part of ObamaCare.

Steven Rattner has a piece on the New York Times op-ed page criticizing what he says are the radical and extreme economic policies of the Republican presidential candidates.

He writes:

Take the agreement to avert a disastrous default by cutting at least $2.1 trillion from the deficit over the next decade. Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul all opposed it. Only Jon M. Huntsman Jr. (whose poll numbers — perhaps not coincidentally — are in the single digits) supported it.

By this measure, Mr. Rattner's pal Michael Bloomberg is also radical and extreme — the mayor published an editorial denouncing the agreement as "an alarming bipartisan mess" and warning, "the deal provides far too little future deficit reduction to put the government's finances on a sustainable path."

More from Mr. Rattner:

The Washington Post has a look at the economy of the national capital, which is booming.

Washingtonians now enjoy the highest median household income of any metropolitan area in the country, and five of the top 10 jurisdictions in America — Loudoun, Howard and Fairfax counties, and Falls Church and Fairfax City — are here, census data shows.

Columnist Thomas Sowell praises the black, Democratic, mayor of Philadelphia, Michael Nutter:

"Pull up your pants and buy a belt 'cause no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt," he said. "If you walk into somebody's office with your hair uncombed and a pick in the back, and your shoes untied, and your pants half down, tattoos up and down your arms and on your neck, and you wonder why somebody won't hire you? They don't hire you 'cause you look like you're crazy," the mayor said. He added: "You have damaged your own race."

While this might seem like it is just plain common sense, what Mayor Nutter said undermines a whole vision of the world that has brought fame, fortune and power to race hustlers in politics, the media and academia. Any racial disparities in hiring can only be due to racism and discrimination, according to the prevailing vision, which reaches from street corner demagogues to the august chambers of the Supreme Court of the United States.

These Obama town halls are really great as a window into what the president really thinks. Here he was in Iowa:

Part of it is the way our media has evolved. It used to be everybody was sitting there watching Walter Cronkite. Now, everybody is on their own little blog or their own separate news forum. If you're a Democrat, you're reading The New York Times. If you're a Republican, you're watching FOX News, right? People don't listen to each other as much.

The New York Times — the Fox News of the left! Even President Obama thinks the paper has a pro-Democrat bias.

More highlights, or lowlights, depending on how one sees it, from the president's remarks at that Iowa town hall:

Here is President Obama, in spontaneous (or, as spontaneous as he gets) remarks during the question and answer portion of a Town Hall meeting in Minnesota, defending government:

The New York Times has a news article about Warren Buffett's op-ed piece calling for higher taxes on the "rich." From the news article:

Despite the intense antitax sentiment that has helped the rise of the Tea Party movement since Mr. Obama took office, tax rates in the United States are at their lowest level since Harry Truman was president.

In 1950, the top income bracket had a 91 percent rate; today it is 35 percent.

The Herald and the Globe both have coverage of the decision by Evergreen Solar to file for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11. The Herald reports, "The list of top creditors in today's bankruptcy filing lists a $1.5 million debt to MassDevelopment, the quasi-public state economic development agency."

Earlier coverage of Evergreen's decision to close the Massachusetts plant built with taxpayer subsidies and to move its operations to China is here.

My latest weekly column is about religion and the presidential campaign and is up at Reason.com. Check it out here.

Frederick Hess has an interview with the former New York State commissioner of education, David Steiner, who reports: "Because of federal largess, we had at some points in the agency over 40 experts in nutrition around the issue of school lunches. At the same time, we had one person who was an expert on science education because the federal funding was there for the nutrition experts, but we had to rely on state funding for the science curriculum expert. That wasn't an intended consequence, but sitting where I did with the staff I had, you can imagine that may feel a little odd."

Link via @JoshGreenman.

Forty years ago today President Nixon closed the gold window and announced wage and price controls. The New York Sun, Lewis Lehrman in the Wall Street Journal, Amity Shlaes and Ilan Kolet at the Bloomberg Echoes blog, the Cato Institute, and the Web site Nixon's Wage and Price Freeze all have coverage. Mr. Lerhman mentions the tariff increases that were part of the move, but for the most part the focus in the press coverage is on monetary policy, gold, and inflation. I'd add two points. First, part of Nixon's move was to raise taxes. From his speech announcing the whole thing:

From Rush Limbaugh's daily email newsletter: "Why did Fox want these people to tear up each other? Because they want approval from the mainstream media, because that's what mainstream media would do."

Sounds like my analysis from last night, though my criticism was directed more at the Washington Examiner folks than at Fox: "Maybe because the journalists were from outlets with conservative reputations, they went out of their way to ask questions with perhaps surprisingly liberal premises, perhaps to prove to their fellow journalists that they weren't 'in the tank' for the Republicans."