From a news article about commercial real estate in today's Wall Street Journal: "To look at the placid new design for 87 Chambers St., the site of a long-planned boutique hotel, is to feel a twinge of appreciation for the Landmarks Preservation Commission, the city's arbiter of what can and can't be built in designated historic districts."

The Journal reports that the Landmarks Commission sent an architect back to the drawing board. One commissioner reacted to the initial plan by saying, "To me it's a flat facade. Four inches is not sufficient depth."

Well, one could react to all this by feeling "a twinge of appreciation for the Landmarks Preservation Commission," as the Journal reporter apparently does. But one could also react by wondering why, at 87 Chambers Street — which isn't exactly Buckingham Palace — a government agency is imposing aesthetic judgments down to inches on what the owner of a property builds there.

Elliott Abrams, a national security staffer in the George W. Bush and Reagan administrations now at the Council on Foreign Relations, has some criticism of how President Obama handled the announcement of the finding and killing of Osama Bin Laden:

It is entirely appropriate that Mr. Obama and the Administration get and take a fair amount of credit.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt has done "a very good job" as CEO of General Electric, says the former head of NBC Universal, Jeffrey Zucker.

Mr. Zucker made his comment in response to a question I asked at the annual alumni luncheon of the Harvard Crimson, which was Saturday at the Harvard Faculty Club. Mr. Zucker had said that because of Saturday Night Live and the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, NBC had a well-developed tradition of "making fun of management."

This NPR article headlined "Studies: Rich Don't Flee High-Tax States" is pretty terrible. One of the studies tracks "migration between states in New England." Fine, but what about all the people leaving New England for no-income-tax Florida? Or all of the New Yorkers leaving for lower-tax Connecticut? The claim in respect of Florida seems to be it's all about the weather. If that's so, why aren't all those New Englanders retiring to high-tax Southern California, which has Florida's warm temperatures without the hurricanes?

Another study is summarized by NPR as follows:

In 1994, New Jersey increased taxes on income over $500,000 by 2.6 percent. And what happened?

"The vast, vast majority just don't respond to the tax. They stay put," says sociologist Charles Varner of Princeton University. Varner compared people who were just under the line for the new tax — who made, say, $400,000 a year — with those who suddenly had to pay more taxes.

WASHINGTON – George Soros — the money manager and financier of left-wing causes — turns out to be a fan of Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian economist whose Road to Serfdom, warning of the perils of central planning, has been a bestseller amid President Obama's expansion of government.

That was the message from Mr. Soros's remarks here this afternoon at a Cato Institute forum.

Mr. Soros described his own views, emphasizing "fallibility" and "reflexivity," as "in accordance with Hayek's ideas." He said that in the late 1940s, as a student at the London School of Economics, he had come out "on Hayek's side" against socialism, "scientism," and central planning.

Mr. Soros said he'd been "influenced" by Hayek. "He has had a big influence on my thinking," Mr. Soros said, going on to describe government regulation as "a necessary evil."

"If you can avoid the regulation, you should," Mr. Soros said, explaining that regulation tended to be bureaucratic, arbitrary, and influenced by special interests, and therefore more imperfect than markets.

President Obama wrote Tuesday to congressional leaders urging them to raise taxes on oil and gas companies because of what the president calls "outsized profits this quarter," raising the question of what Mr. Obama thinks the correct size of the profits of these companies should be. So it's interesting to have a look at the ExxonMobil earnings release out today, which reports that the company had earnings of $10,650,000,000, and paid taxes of $27,749,000,000. If ExxonMobil's $10.7 billion in profits are "outsized," in the president's view, what does that make the company's $27.7 billion in taxes?

The Keynes Vs. Hayek, Round Two YouTube video is now live and embedded below.

Lyrics are available at the Econstories.tv site. Our interview with co-creator Russell Roberts about the original Hayek-Keynes rap video is here.

For all the discussion of President Obama's birth certificate, there hasn't been much focus on the underlying issue: why, at this stage in the history of America, is the presidency limited to "natural born" citizens to begin with? Long before Barack Obama announced his presidential campaign or his birth certificate became an "issue," the New York Sun addressed the issue, in a September 2, 2004 editorial headlined "The Schwarzenegger Amendment." It said, in part:

It's true that governments once sought to win foreign influence and power by capturing the thrones of other nations. But it's difficult to imagine Austria employing this tactic should Mr. Schwarzenegger become a contender for the White House - or Canada, for that matter, should Michigan's Canadian-born governor, Jennifer Granholm, find herself on a national ticket. Even if Austria or Canada tried to exercise some undue influence, there's little chance it would be successful. Mr. Schwarzenegger and Ms. Granholm are Americans now.....

Republican congressman Joe Barton's claim that Apple apparently "lied" to him "and another lawmaker" last year when it responded to a letter he sent them about iPhone user location date is a front-page news article in today's Wall Street Journal.

The Journal leaves two questions unasked and unanswered: First, who was the other lawmaker? And second, what was Mr. Barton doing in the first place sending Apple interrogatory letters last year?

The answer to the first question is Congressman Ed Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, a member of that House Progressive Caucus that issued the Paul Krugman "People's Budget" aiming to double your taxes.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's first press conference, just concluded, was a pretty sorry affair. None of the reporters really broke out of the box and asked about the Constitution or gold. They seemed mainly interested in what Mr. Bernanke was going to do and his forecast on the economy, not in whether he had the authority to do it or whether the enterprise he was engaged in was worthwhile to begin with. The most newsworthy part, I thought, came when, in response to a question from NPR on whether the second round of quantitative easing had been effective, Mr. Bernanke responded that the program was "successful" because "we saw increases in stock prices." Let any buyer of shares be warned — the price of what you own will depend on what Mr. Bernanke and his colleagues on the Fed Open Market Committee think the price should be.

Some pretty remarkable developments are under way in Massachusetts, where the state House of Representatives, where Democrats hold a 128-32 majority, has just voted 111-42 to "strip police officers, teachers, and other municipal employees of most of their rights to bargain over health care," as the Boston Globe puts it. The Globe quotes Robert J. Haynes, president of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO, as vowing, "We are going to fight this thing to the bitter end," and observing, "these are the same Democrats that all these labor unions elected." Also last night, the same Massachusetts House voted unanimously "to ban welfare recipients from spending their cash benefits on alcohol, tobacco, and lottery tickets," as the Globe puts that.

"Only tax rises can fix America's budget mess" is the headline of a piece by Steven Rattner in the Financial Times. Mr. Rattner advocates what he calls "sensible tax increases," including an increase in the 15% rate that applies to dividends and long-term capital gains and a repeal of all the George W. Bush income tax cuts, not only those for upper-income earners.

Mr. Rattner wants to go back to Clinton-era tax rates. "The economy boomed," during the Clinton years, he argues. Fine: if the Clinton years were so wonderful, how about going back to Clinton-era spending levels, which in nominal dollars were $1.789 trillion in 2000, less than half the $3.8 trillion President Obama budgeted for 2011?

The Republican speaker of the House, John Boehner, said Congress should "certainly ... take a look at" raising taxes on oil and gas companies, explaining, "we're at a time when the federal government's short on revenues," and mentioning the oil depletion allowance as a potential target.

For this we need Republicans? As Mr. Boehner's Budget chairman, Paul Ryan, has tried to explain the federal government doesn't have a revenue problem, it has a spending problem. And raising taxes on energy at a time when gas is $4 a gallon or higher might well result in the tax increases being passed along to consumers in the form of higher prices.

On the oil depletion allowance, Senator Kennedy's October 13, 1960 letter has some good points:

In answer to your inquiry regarding my position on the oil-depletion allowance, please be advised as follows:

Bloomberg News has a feature on Pricelock, a company that is offering to businesses the sort of fixed price gasoline contract that we suggested for consumers in the post on The Behavioral Economics of Gas Prices. A mention of the company also showed up in the comments section of that post. Goldman Sachs and Barclays are reportedly investors.

USA Today reports:

Americans depended more on government assistance in 2010 than at any other time in the nation's history, a USA TODAY analysis of federal data finds. The trend shows few signs of easing, even though the economic recovery is nearly 2 years old.

A record 18.3% of the nation's total personal income was a payment from the government for Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, unemployment benefits and other programs in 2010. Wages accounted for the lowest share of income — 51.0% — since the government began keeping track in 1929....

Americans got an average of $7,427 in benefits each in 2010, up from an inflation-adjusted $4,763 in 2000 and $3,686 in 1990. The federal government pays about 90% of the benefits.