The Cato Institute has a video of a professor at the University of London, Mark Pennington, talking about his book, Robust Political Economy.

His main point is that the "classical liberal" set-up of a minimal state and an open market is the most robust design for a world of actors with limited rationality and limited benevolence.

First Vice President Biden — for whom the $37.7 million Amtrak station in Wilmington, Delaware is named — touts an administration plan to spend $53 billion on high-speed rail.

Now, at the behest of two Democratic lawmakers, Senator Schumer and Rep. Nydia Velazquez, the National Transportation Safety Board is launching "a comprehensive review of the discount bus industry and the safety regulations governing it."

It's a little strange that the review is announced not by the NTSB but by the politicians who called for the review. And it sure seems like the federal government is doing what it can to hurt the bus industry — not only spending $53 billion to subsidize high-speed rail, a competing form of transportation, but also tightening regulations on the bus industry.

On the other hand, the New York Times article reports that "The inquiry will examine, among other things, the effectiveness of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the agency charged with overseeing the tour-bus industry. The agency has been criticized for failing to enforce its own regulations."

Now there is a promising field of inquiry.

Ross Douthat has a column in today's New York Times under the headline "The G.O.P.'s empty stage," likening the situation in the Republican presidential race to that preceding 1996. The column concludes as follows:

Fifteen years ago, in the wake of the 1994 Republican revolution, conservatives were in a similar position — fresh from a midterm victory but politically overextended, struggling to persuade a wary public to embrace limited government in practice as well as theory.

Out of a mediocre primary field, they ended up with Bob Dole as their standard-bearer. Their cause did not soon recover.

For an example of how two different news organization or two different reporters can have completely opposing takes on the same story, look at how the Associated Press handles that fight about the San Francisco payroll tax that we had an item about last week.

While the TechCrunch article we linked last week saw it as an opportunity to get rid of the payroll tax entirely and make San Francisco more competitive with Silicon Valley for job creation, the AP sees it as an opportunity to dwell on income inequality:

The Wall Street Journal, along with its article on the IRS targeting "rich" taxpayers for audits (Forbes had a similar article last week), has a copy of a nine page, 47-question "information document request" that one taxpayer received from the IRS. The story doesn't mention General Electric, but it made me think of GE's 975-person tax department in a somewhat different light than did the New York Times article that reported it. After all, if the IRS is showering requests like this on taxpayers — at some large companies, the IRS even has full-time teams of auditors on site who work full time on just those companies — it's a labor-intensive task simply to respond to the requests, let alone dream up ways of lowering a company's tax exposure. The "information document request" is also interesting reading in the context of Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid's claim that the American income tax system is "voluntary."

The Wall Street Journal has a news story about the French-American School of New York, which paid $8.5 million for a 128-acre former country club in White Plains only to face opposition from residents who want the White Plains city government to prevent the private school from building on part of the land. So much for property rights. The Journal describes White Plains as "bucolic," which it might be in parts, and which it might be overall compared to, say, Midtown Manhattan, but which by the standards of the rest of America seems maybe like a bit of an overstatement. Check out the food court of The Westchester shopping mall on a weekend night, and "bucolic" wouldn't be exactly the first word that comes to mind.

Much of the press reaction to David Sokol's investment in Lubrizol seems to express astonishment that he would have invested personally in something that also might have been something that Berkshire Hathaway would invest in. People seem to have forgotten that there's a recent precedent for mixing personal investing and investing for Berkshire, in an offer that Warren Buffett himself made in his October 6, 2008 "Dear Hank" letter to then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.

That letter proposed a deal in which, in the words of the letter, "The company I head, Berkshire Hathaway, would be pleased to invest $500 million" and "I would be willing to personally buy $100 million of stock in this public offering. (This constitutes about 20% of my net worth outside of my Berkshire holdings, which as you know are promised to charity.)"

Writing in the New York Times, Joe Nocera weighs in on the Warren Buffett-David Sokol-Lubrizol situation. He writes:

How is this not, on its face, evidence of insider trading? A guy buys stock in a company and then talks his boss into buying the company. The fact that his boss is Warren Buffett makes it even more "material," to use the word the S.E.C. favors when it investigates insider trading. If a company executive trades on material information, knowing that he is privy to stock-moving news that hasn't yet been divulged to other shareholders, he is likely to be committing a crime. When Warren Buffett buys a company, the stock price goes up. Everybody knows that — including, presumably, Dave Sokol.

Utah has become the first state to pass a law exempting gold and silver coins from the state's capital gains tax and requiring the state to recognize gold and silver coins as legal tender, the Deseret News reports. The governor signed the bill into law on March 25. The text of the bill is here. It also orders a study of "the possibility of establishing an alternative form of legal tender for the payment of debts, public charges, taxes, and dues within the state."

I learned of this via The American Principles Project, which notes, "Utah is the first state to move toward recognizing gold and silver as money. Ten other states have proposed similar bills, but none have been voted out of committee." The project goes on:

The New York Times has a news article that runs under the headline "Republican Budget Hard-Liners Get Support from Tea Party." It begins, "As House Republican leaders worked to cobble together a spending plan for this year that can win bipartisan support, their more conservative members made increasingly clear on Thursday that they consider a proposed $33 billion budget cut to be insufficient."

If you believe the household survey of the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (a big "if", but still) — the U.S. economy has created 1,130,000 jobs in the three months since the Republicans took over the House of Representatives and since the deal was struck to extend the Bush tax cuts for another two years. If this keeps up, by the time the presidential election rolls around, gloom-and-doom rhetoric like that of Mitt Romney's op-ed in yesterday's USA Today — "Even 7.5% unemployment means 11.5 million Americans without jobs. The human cost of that dry statistic can be detailed in a canvas of broken hopes and shattered lives. Workers at job fairs today are confronting an employment market in which there are almost five times as many job seekers as there are openings. Anyone who has visited such a fair or gone to a career center has seen the face of despair up close." — is going to seem out of touch.

Bloomberg's Matthew Winkler has a piece on some of what the Federal Reserve was hiding when it went to court to resist his news organization's request for records on what banks accessed the Fed's "discount window": "the Bank of China Ltd. (3988) and Arab Banking Corp., a Bahrain- based bank controlled by the Libyan Central Bank, both tapped the window."

Stephen Moore, writing in the Wall Street Journal:

Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million)....It gets worse. More Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities combined. We have moved decisively from a nation of makers to a nation of takers.

I'm a little skeptical of these occupational categories — they are dreamed up and counted by the same government workers Mr. Moore derides. If American workers design medical devices or write software, they are still "makers," even if the end products are stamped out in overseas factories. Still, it's a sobering piece.

NBC is running an online poll about the behavior of David Sokol, an executive of a Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary who invested about $10 million in Lubrizol, a company that Berkshire then bought at his suggestion, leaving him with a profit of about $3 million. Nine percent of respondents say what he did was illegal, 32% say it was unethical, and 33% say it was both illegal and unethical. Only 25% say it is "no big deal."

Mr. Sokol himself said on CNBC this morning that while he doesn't think he did anything illegal, unethical, or inappropriate, if he had it to do over again he wouldn't have mentioned the company to Mr. Buffett. Regular readers of this site know I'm a frequent critic of Berkshire CEO Warren Buffett, but in this case, on the basis of the information that's out there so far, I think he and Mr. Sokol are getting a bit of a raw deal in the press coverage.

"Irony alert" are the words that digitaltrends.com uses to introduce its dispatch on the news that Microsoft, once the target of a federal antitrust suit in the U.S., has filed a formal antitrust complaint in the European Union against Google.

Ten years from now, Google will probably be pleading for the government to take antitrust action against Facebook, and ten years after that, Facebook will probably be asking the government to take antitrust action against some company that doesn't even exist yet and that makes some product or provides some service that we can't even imagine today. In other words, if you want evidence that government antitrust enforcement in the technology field is usually unnecessary or pointless, look no further than the fact that innovation manages to turn yesterday's monopolist into today's monopoly victim.