Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein has a new podcast with Russell Roberts. Highlights from the summary:

we will see a systematic shift from production to compliance as the kind of general political ethic of our time. One of more frightening features is that all of the increase seems to be on the government side; almost none of it seems to be on the private sector side. Means since much of the private sector employment is an effort to beef up your compliance, the number of productive workers you see in the United States as opposed to their political overseers is going down. Augurs badly for growth of production in the United States. Regulation has two costs: direct cost of administration from the government side and compliance from the private industry side.

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President Obama, in his weekly address over the weekend, tried to get Congress to help him restrict what the Supreme Court has ruled are the Constitutional speech rights of his opponents: "We have taken a stand against the worst abuses of the financial industry and health insurance companies. We've rolled back tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas. ...any time you see an attack ad by one of these shadowy groups, you should ask yourself, who is paying for this ad? Is it the health insurance lobby? The oil industry? The credit card companies?"

Don't the health insurers, oil companies, and credit card issuers have a right to respond publicly to a president who vilifies them? It's one thing to have a president who criticizes vast sectors of the American economy that employ plenty of honest, hardworking Americans. It's another thing for the president to want to change the laws to make it harder for these companies to defend themselves against his attacks.

An editorial in the New York Times Company-owned Worcester Telegram and Gazette chides Senator Kerry for a fundraising email sent by the senator describing the Tea Party as extremist. Says the editorial: "a fair-minded observer can't help but conclude that once you clear away the few noisy and irrelevant voices that can be found in any movement, tea party activists are primarily about reducing the size and role of government, re-emphasizing the central role of the Constitution, and empowering ordinary citizens to have a greater voice in their own governance."

Libertarian law firm the Institute For Justice is suing on behalf of D.C. tour guide operators, arguing that the city's licensing requirements are unconstitutional. New York also licenses tour guides. "In America, you're not supposed to need the government's permission to speak," says an IJ video about the case.

Instapundit, in picking up my post on the Weiner-Waxman gold hearing and the point that "if a Republican-majority Congress started investigating and having a regulatory crackdown on big advertisers in liberal outlets such as the New York Times, the First Amendment freedom-of-the-press crowd would be marching in the streets," commented, "The New York Times still has big advertisers?" Powerline repeats the gibe, reacting, in Instapundit's own inimitable style, "Heh."

Two days after the post here on Dinesh D'Souza's Forbes article, Glenn Beck had Mr. D'Souza on the radio (transcript here), and Mr. D'Souza's book The Roots of Obama's Rage shot up the Amazon bestseller list. Now the left press is circling the wagons: The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz had an article yesterday critical of Mr. D'Souza's article and quoting the Columbia Journalism Review describing the piece as "a fact-twisting, error-laden piece of paranoia" and "the worst kind of smear journalism--a singularly disgusting work." Today, in the New York Times, David Brooks — the guy Congressman Paul Ryan praised the other day as "a columnist of intellectual rigor and much-deserved respect" — weighs in:

News Corp. chief executive Rupert Murdoch and New York Observer owner and real estate investor Jared Kushner are close enough pals that Mr. Kushner and his wife reportedly accompanied the Murdoch family on a recent Middle East trip for the christening of the Murdoch daughters. So it's been interesting to watch the coverage in Mr. Murdoch's Wall Street Journal of Mr. Kushner's real estate interests. The very first issue of the Greater New York section of the Journal (where a bunch of my former New York Sun colleagues work) carried a prominently placed article hyping the Kushner-owned 666 Fifth Avenue; today's Journal carries a piece hyping the Kushner-owned Puck building.

For a newspaper that tends to sneer at Republicans as the party of the rich and that likes to express sympathy for the poor, the New York Times sure gave a hard time in its front-page news article to Christine O'Donnell. Reports the Times, "She has struggled for years with personal finance problems — she has reported earnings of only $5,800 between most of this year and last and she has defaulted on her mortgage."

The Times also reports, "she told a reporter for The News Journal of Wilmington last March that her campaign had paid half the rent on her town house there because it doubled as her headquarters, one of several financial oddities enumerated in an article in that paper....She said that while she participated in the cap-and-gown ceremony nearly two decades ago, she was unable to formally graduate because of unpaid tuition."

The use of the internet classified community Craigslist for sex ads has been the subject of a Congressional hearing, scrutiny by 17 state attorneys general, and extensive press coverage, including an article on the front of the business section of the New York Times. The objection seemed to be, in part, that the Web site was being used to facilitate illegal activities.

Just as the government is trying to prevent people from investing in anything other than T-Bills by raising taxes on taxable interest and dividends to confiscatory levels, it's also trying to prevent you from parking your wealth in assets, like gold, that compete with the paper dollars issued by the Federal Reserve and the Treasury. A press release from Rep. Anthony Weiner, Democrat of New York, not yet (as of this instant) posted on Mr. Weiner's Web site, announces that a September 23 hearing of the Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection (a subcommittee of Rep. Henry Waxman's Commerce Committee) will focus on "legislation that would regulate gold-selling companies, an industry who's [sic] relentless advertising is now staple of cable television."

From Treasury Secretary Geithner's testimony today before the Senate Banking Committee:

China has for a long time combined the pursuit of an export-driven growth strategy with a substantial set of protections and preferences for its domestic industries. We are committed to leveling that playing field. ...For example, the government still plays a very large direct role in the economy, through state- owned enterprises, and in the allocation of credit and other inputs to domestic production. ...We are very concerned about the negative impact of these policies on our economic interests

You almost wonder if Mr. Geithner wants to "level the playing field" by reducing the "very large direct role" that the Chinese government plays in the Chinese economy — or by replicating it here in America. Either way, it's a sad day when the first reaction one has to an American Treasury secretary denouncing a very large direct government role in the economy is a chuckle.

Two pieces worth highlighting explain the coming tax increases. The American Enterprise Institute's Alan Viard writes:

the claim that the president's plan would only take the top tax rates back to Clinton levels isn't quite right. Or, rather, it's right for only the first two years of the president's plan. Thanks to a little-known provision in the new healthcare law, the president's plan will push the top tax rates for most types of income above Clinton levels in 2013 and thereafter.

Congressman Paul Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, has a piece up at Economic Policies for the 21st Century praising New York Times columnist David Brooks as "a columnist of intellectual rigor and much-deserved respect." Mr. Ryan goes on to say that Mr. Brooks's column from the other day, which insisted, "Over the next decade there will have to be spending cuts and tax increases," in Mr. Ryan's view, "elevates the tone and the substance of the debate to a serious level."

Reason magazine's Matt Welch, rebutting the same Brooks column, was less obsequious.

Mr. Ryan's praise for Mr. Brooks comes in the context of an article pushing back at Mr. Brooks's criticism of him, but it may strike a lot of free-market types as fulsome.

A battle within the right-of-center press is raging over the Republican candidate for Senate in Delaware.

First to pick up on it was the American Spectator, which, in a September 10 post by Jeffrey Lord headlined "The Ruling Class Hits Christine O'Donnell," took aim at the Wall Street Journal editorial page and National Review for supporting Mike Castle over Ms. O'Donnell in the Delaware Republican Senate primary. A Journal editorial had said, "If she does defeat Mr. Castle, however, she has little chance to win in November. A two-time loser statewide, Ms. O'Donnell has a history of financial troubles..." The editorial went on to huff, "tea partiers who want to restore proper Constitutional limits, rather than merely pad the ratings of talk radio, might recall William F. Buckley Jr.'s counsel that his policy was to vote for the most conservative candidate who could win."

Alan Greenspan spoke today at the Council on Foreign Relations, and, as summarized by this report in the Wall Street Journal, says that "government now needs to get out of the way and allow businesses and markets to power the recovery" and that, at the same time, he favors "allowing the so-called Bush tax cuts to expire." How a big tax increase constitutes government getting "out of the way" is one of those mysteries that maybe you need to be a former central banker to understand.