The Wall Street Journal has an excellent piece by Russell Roberts on the Hayek craze.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page, which just last week was advocating for the Volcker Rule, today backpedals:

Take the Volcker Rule, which proscribes banks that accept insured deposits from engaging in the riskiest kinds of trading. This makes sense in theory but the rule's execution will depend on how regulators define and enforce it. It's hardly reassuring when the Davis Polk & Wardwell law firm has to write a seven-page memo, as it did on Friday, explaining how this rule-making will proceed. The Volcker Rule may work in restraining excessive risk-taking. Or it may merely drive that risk-taking into other institutions that will attract the best and brightest drawn to the higher profits such trading can gain.

Also in the Summer issue of National Affairs, Harvard economist Gregory Mankiw has an article about whether fiscal stimulus is best delivered as tax cuts or as government spending:

Perhaps the most compelling research on this subject is a very recent study by my colleagues Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna at Harvard. They used data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to identify every major fiscal stimulus adopted by the 30 OECD countries between 1970 and 2007. Alesina and Ardagna then separated those plans that were in fact followed by robust economic growth from those that were not, and compared their characteristics. They found that the stimulus packages that appeared to be successful had cut business and income taxes, while those that evidently did not succeed had increased government spending and transfer payments.

The Summer issue of National Affairs is out and it includes a look by John Hood at Medicaid, the government heath care coverage for the poor that will see a big expansion under ObamaCare:

A New York Times account of the David Weigel blow-up at the Washington Post reports that "Mr. Weigel, who had written for Reason magazine and the Washington Independent, was one of several hundred journalists, commentators and policy watcher who contributed to Journolist, a left-leaning forum operated by Ezra Klein, who is also a blogger for The Post. Journolist messages were generally kept private by the members." It kind of makes one wonder who are the other journalists on this list, and what else they have been saying on it, no? Politico's Ben Smith says he's on the list.

The New York Post has it.

Thanks to a reader-participant-watchdog-community member for sending the link.

The decision of the White House correspondent of Bloomberg News, Edwin Chen, to return to work at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group, was noted here earlier. Mr. Chen has just completed a term as president of the White House Correspondents' Association. Now, via the Publishers Lunch newsletter, comes news that the executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, Peter Lehner, will be writing "the first book-length account of recent oil spill, DEEPWATER HORIZON: The Oil Disaster, Its Aftermath, and Our Future." Mr. Lehner's co-author? "Bob Deans, former head of the White House Correspondents Association."

Michael Barone has a new Washington Examiner column that runs under the headline "Americans Relate to Founders, Not Progressives." The conclusion:

The polls and the post-2008 election results show that the purported beneficiaries of the Obama Democrats' programs are unenthusiastic about voting and people with modest incomes are trending heavily Republican. The only enthusiasm for the Obama Democrats' policies comes from David Brooks's "educated class": people who are or identify with the centralized experts tasked by the Obama Democrats with making decisions for the rest of us. Unfortunately for the Obama Democrats, they, unlike property owners, are not a majority in today's America.

Thanks to reader-participant-community member-watchdog T. for sending the link.

The Economist test-drives the GM Volt and declares it "extraordinarily refined."

The Institute for Justice has reaction to Columbia University's victory in the New York Court of Appeals on an eminent domain case:

The New York opinion comes only one day after the fifth anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Kelo v. City of New London. That opinion—which allowed the government to condemn homes in the name of "economic development"—spurred a national backlash, leading to legislative changes and court decisions providing property owners with greater protection in 43 states. Political and judicial leaders in New York, however, have refused to reform their eminent domain laws, which are among the worst in the nation.

In the latest illustration that ObamaCare was hardly the last word on health care spending from Congress, the House last night passed the so called "Doc Fix," increasing Medicare reimbursement rates for doctors, by a vote of 417 to 1. The Senate had already passed it, so it will now go to the president, who is expected to sign it.

The one member who voted against it was George Miller, Democrat of California; an aide to Mr. Miller told FutureOfCapitalism.com that the Congressman was casting "a protest vote" related to a lack of 401K fee disclosure provisions in the Senate bill.

Steven Horwitz at Coordination Problem has a wonderful post about a new study (pdf) by Robert Carroll of the Tax Foundation on income mobility and inequality:

In all, over the 1999 through 2007 period, about 675,000 taxpayers earned over a $1 million for at least one year. Of these taxpayers, about 338,000 (50 percent) were a millionaire in only one year, while just 38,000 (6 percent) remained a millionaire in all nine years. Based on these results, it is clear that taxpayers move in and out of millionaire status with great frequency....

Carroll uses a nice analogy from Schumpeter that I'd never heard before: the distribution of income is like a hotel with some really fancy rooms on the top floors and some very basic ones on the bottom. All the rooms are always full, but who occupies which rooms changes from year to year.

Something to think about the next time a tax increase on "millionaires" is proposed.

From the Financial Times's front-page article on the bank capital requirements known as Basel III:

"The Basel committee is trying to give a lot of freedom to individual countries," said one senior Spanish banker. "But then, you just have a mess, and no level playing field."

This is incredibly important for understanding the way in which the financial regulation drive is in significant ways an assault on the whole concept of national sovereignty. And since some of the countries participating -- the G20, for example, includes both China and Saudi Arabia -- aren't even free or democratic, it undercuts the whole concept of self-governance.

The New York Times had an editorial Monday headlined "A Bruise on the First Amendment," bemoaning a law that makes it a crime for American to provide "material support" to terrorist groups. The headline would have been more accurately placed on the Times's editorial from this morning, which not only praises a bill that "would put restrictions on campaign spending by major government contractors and foreign controlled companies," but even criticizes the law for allowing "exceptions for the National Rifle Association and other large nonprofit groups that exercised last-minute arm-twisting."

In other words, according to the Times, if the government tries to prevent Americans from providing material support to terrorist groups, it's a First Amendment violation. But if the government tries to restrict the National Rifle Association, Toyota, BP, or Boeing from airing television commercials that include political speech, that's laudable.

White House officials are meeting often with lobbyists at Caribou Coffee rather than in their offices as a way of making sure the visits are not disclosed when White House visitor logs are made public, the New York Times reports.