Here's the Wall Street Journal's latest handling of the debate between Bruce Berkowitz and David Einhorn over the value of St. Joe, a Florida real estate company:

AIG represents the latest in a series of recent stumbles for Mr. Berkowitz...Mr. Berkwowitz's massive investment in St. Joe Co. landed him in a high-profile back-and-forth with hedge fund manager David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital, who was shorting the stock. Mr. Berkowitz has since taken over as chairman of St. Joe after ousting the company's chief executive. Fund documents show the fund's average cost of JOE at about $26 per share. The stock currently is around $25.

Amity Shlaes has a column up at Bloomberg arguing that Congress should give the president back the "impoundment" authority it took away in 1974: "Such a law needn't make the president into a dictator. It need merely restore the balance that existed before 1974."

In Force of Nature: The Unlikely Story of Walmart's Green Revolution, Edward Humes describes what he calls "the next industrial revolution — the one in which the pursuit of profit and the protection of the planet stop being mutually exclusive and start being one and the same."

The book focuses on a "river guide turned corporate consultant" named Jib Ellison who tells businesses they should become more "sustainable" not just because it's good for their image or the right thing to do but because it will help their bottom lines.

Mr. Ellison's signature client is Walmart, where he got involved though a connection to Walmart's chairman, Rob Walton.

New Jersey's Republican governor, Chris Christie, is going to spend $200 million taxpayer dollars on a Bergen County shopping mall. The Manhattan Institute's Nicole Gelinas has an op-ed in the Newark Star-Ledger calling it "a lapse in judgment, at best." She writes: "here's an idea. Let government stick to what it should do and return any extra money lying around to taxpayers so they can make their own investment decisions."

Mike Allen's Politico Playbook reports:

WHAT A TOP WASHPOST EDITOR THINKS – Raju Narisetti (one of two managing editors) tweets: "Thought encounter of the day: 'Would be good if our schools are fully funded and DoD has to hold a bake sale to buy its next fighter jet.'" Somewhere in Takoma Park, a Volvo is missing its bumper sticker. (What next: Whirled peas? Arms are for hugging?) Certainly not kicking the Pentagon when it's down! Raju's Twitter bio: "I am never speaking for The Post." See the tweet. http://bit.ly/l9k6DI

Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek, here, and Peter Boettke at Coordination Problem, here, have already replied to Francis Fukuyama's review in Sunday's New York Times of the new edition of F.A. Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty. (Update: as has NYU's William Easterly). Through the wonders of the Internet, however, FutureOfCapitalism has managed, miraculously, to obtain a copy of a letter to the Times in response to the review from Hayek himself, who died in 1992. Here it is:

To the editor:

A former senator from New Hampshire, John Sununu, has a good explainer in the Boston Globe on oil-and-gas-company taxes:

The only problem is that on careful inspection, some of these "special interest" tax breaks just don't look very special.

President Obama called for eliminating "over $4 billion per year" in oil company benefits (and spending the proceeds on energy subsidies he likes). The largest of four main targets is called the manufacturers tax credit because — surprise — it's available to every manufacturer in the United States. Redefining "manufacturer" to exclude oil and gas companies would raise their taxes by $1.7 billion per year. (Full disclosure: I was one of a handful of senators who opposed the creation of this tax credit in 2005.) Maybe energy producers shouldn't count as "real" manufacturers; better yet, maybe we shouldn't have one tax system for manufacturers and another for everyone else.

The outgoing secretary of defense, Robert Gates, in a commencement speech over the weekend at Washington State University, stands up for government employees: "Too often those who chose public service are dismissed as bureaucrats or worse, and in many cases politicians run for office running down the very government they hope to lead. Cynicism about the people and the institutions that govern and protect our country can be corrosive. So I worry that too many of our brightest young Americans, so public-minded, so engaged in volunteer service, on campus and in their communities, turn aside when it comes to careers in public service....I have seen, in political appointees and career civil servants alike, an extraordinary number of people of the highest quality acting with steadfast integrity and love of this country and what it stands for."

Thomas B. Reed, a Republican congressman from Maine who served six years as speaker of the House of Representatives, mainly in the 1890s, is an obscure enough figure that James Grant's new biography, Mr. Speaker!, uses a subtitle to explain who Reed was: "The man who broke the filibuster." 

I came away from the book admiring Reed's defense of voting rights for blacks and his support for women's suffrage, but less than entirely convinced that the rest of Reed's policy program — including a tariff to protect American industry from foreign competition and an isolationist bent in foreign affairs — deserves to be rescued from obscurity.

What does deserve to be rescued from obscurity, though, is this period in American history, and here Mr. Grant is an able guide and Reed a better-than-serviceable vehicle for the narrative. For many Americans, exposed to their country's history mainly in yearlong high school survey courses, Civil War Reconstruction jumps pretty quickly into Teddy Roosevelt's trustbusting. But pause to look around rather than rushing on through, and it turns out that the period between the Civil War and the turn of the 20^th century was full of ferment, not least on the monetary policy matters to which Mr. Grant, as founder of Grant's Interest Rate Observer, brings particularly deep knowledge.

To anyone following the current headlines about Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke and the price of the dollar in gold or silver, Mr. Grant's account of the events of 1869 (when the Resumption Act was passed, providing that as of January 1, 1879, $20.67 would be exchangeable for an ounce of gold) through 1900 (when the Gold Standard Act was passed), is valuable context.

In Sunday's New York Times Book Review, Francis Fukuyama reviews the new edition of F.A. Hayek's "Constitution of Liberty."

From a Wall Street Journal "dossier" on hedge fund manager Steven Cohen of SAC Capital: "Cohen regularly takes home personal compensation of $1 billion a year, including a roughly $1 billion paycheck for 2010 after 16% gains in his flagship fund, the Journal has reported."

Whatever Mr. Cohen does with his compensation, I doubt that he "takes" it "home" in a single "paycheck" of $1 billion. Far more likely is that he keeps a substantial chunk of it in the fund or funds that he manages; the Journal reports elsewhere today that Mr. Cohen is "the largest investor in his funds." It may be hard for a news reporter, used to taking home a paycheck, to get her mind around the concept, but there's a difference between taking home a paycheck and making investment gains on a fund in which you are the largest investor and partner. The next year, the fund could lose money.

The New York Post has a brief report on a 23-year-old New Yorker who reaped more than $120,000 in revenue by selling "Bin Laden Is Dead" t-shirts: "Maurice Harary, 23, went straight to his New York apartment when he heard Sunday that bin Laden was killed by US forces ....He immediately began building a website to sell his 'bin Laden is dead' T-shirts. Harary claimed that his site went live at 3:30 a.m. local time Monday and sold 10,000 T-shirts at $12 each by Tuesday night."

Critics of capitalism tend to focus on those who get rich because of luck. But here's a guy who made a lot of money in a short period of time by working hard when most other people were either asleep or out partying. It reminded me of that Vanity Fair excerpt about Bill Gates and Paul Allen staying up late and on weekends to build Microsoft's first piece of software.

"Without a college degree, hard-pressed for jobs," is the headline on an NPR story, right now topping the "most popular list" on the NPR site. Funny how it doesn't mention Microsoft's Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Apple's Steve Jobs, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Enterprise Rent-a-Car's Jack Taylor, Oracle's Larry Ellison, Dell computer's Michael Dell, movie and music producer David Geffen, and Las Vegas Sands CEO Sheldon Adelson. None of them are college graduates, and they're all doing okay.

"Within 25 years, our goal is to give 80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail. (Applause.) This could allow you to go places in half the time it takes to travel by car. For some trips, it will be faster than flying –- without the pat-down. (Laughter and applause.)" — President Obama, State of the Union Address, January 25, 2011.

"Raid reveals Bin Laden eyed U.S. trains" — headline, USA Today, May 5, 2011.

I am not recommending that the Transportation Security Administration extend invasive pat-downs to Amtrak or to the New York subway system. But in retrospect the president's promotion of trains as the low-security travel option seems a little misguided, no?

In a Bloomberg News column, Jonathan Alter notices the president of American Tax Reform, Grover Norquist, urging Republicans to postpone a grand deficit-reduction deal until after the 2012 election:

"Why would you cut a deal between now and 2012 when you're going to get a Republican Senate?" Norquist asks.

Mr. Norquist is both smart and savvy, so I hesitate to second-guess him, but since he is asking, here are a few reasons:

1. Even if the Republicans win the Senate in 2012, they are unlikely to win a 60-seat majority, so the practical effect under Senate rules won't be that different from their current more-than-40-seat minority status.