Daniel Okrent has written a lively new history of Prohibition, Last Call. It's a colorful narrative that conveys what life was life under the federal ban on alcohol. It also bears on at least two themes we write about regularly here – taxes and the influence of religion on views of capitalism.

Mr. Okrent's tale of how Prohibition and its repeal were intertwined with tax policy is fascinating and will be unfamiliar even to many of those who think they know a lot about taxes already.

"By 1910 the federal government was drawing more than $200 million a year from the bottle and the keg – 71 percent of all internal revenue, and more than 30 percent of federal revenue overall," he writes. "Given that you couldn't collect much revenue from a liquor tax in a nation where there was no liquor, this might have seemed an insurmountable problem for the Prohibition movement. Unless, that is, you could weld the drive for Prohibition to the campaign for another reform, the creation of a tax on incomes."

President Obama's choice for the Supreme Court, Elana Kagan, earned a $10,000 stipend for serving as a member of the Goldman Sachs Global Markets Institute advisory council, ProPublica notices. It's not entirely clear from the disclosure form that ProPublica links to whether that was a one-time payment or an annual payment, and, if annual, how many times she received it and how many hours or days of work she put in in return. It's not a lot of money by the standards of Goldman Sachs or by the standards of other Harvard faculty members or administrators with outside jobs in the financial industry, like, say, Lawrence Summers. Say what you will about Goldman, it sure has a way of spotting talent.

The Financial Times has an interview with Claudi Santiago, the Spain-born, Italy-based president and chief executive of General Electric's oil & gas business: "China is also critical. We are supporting China's west-to-east pipeline that snakes through 13 provinces and is longer than the Great Wall....Ownership of reserves has moved from international to national oil companies. Forty years ago, international oil companies such as Shell, Chevron and BP owned 80 per cent of the oil and gas reserves. Today we have 30 per cent more oil and gas reserves, but national oil companies such as PetroChina, Petrobras and Gazprom now own 80 per cent of the known reserves. So we now spend as much time with national oil companies as international oil companies. Often this means meeting energy and deputy ministers."

China has permanently revoked the licenses of two human rights lawyers, the New York Times reports. At least they didn't put burning cigarettes to their eyes, as they did to another human rights lawyer we wrote about here.

On its New York sports page, the Wall Street Journal covers a Reverse Robin-Hood: Mikhail Prokhorov, whose fortune has been estimated at $17 billion, gets to build a new basketball stadium in Brooklyn for the Nets in partnership with Bruce Ratner with $511 million in tax-free bonds. The article is headlined "Bruce Ratner Looks Back on His Ownership of the New Jersey Nets," but it might have been headlined, "American taxpayers, many of whom are struggling to raise capital to invest in their businesses without tax-exempt financing, pay to subsidize stadium for a man who could have afforded to build it with his own money."

In the Wall Street Journal, William McGurn has a column focusing on one of the 23 Republicans in the Illinois state assembly who killed a school voucher bill that had passed the state senate: "Mr. Eddy sure has his objections down pat, here raising constitutional concerns, there talking about inconclusive studies, here again saying vouchers would not help all the Chicago schoolchildren. One fact not open to debate is this: According to the Illinois State Board of Elections, since 2002 Mr. Eddy has accepted more than $76,000 in campaign contributions from the Illinois Education Association, the Illinois Federation of Teachers, and the Chicago Teachers Union."

The Washington Post has an article on Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, whose book Saving Freedom: We Can Stop America's Slide Into Socialism was reviewed here back in June. Highlights from the Washington Post piece: Mr. DeMint says, "The Republican Party, at least a segment of it within Washington, has increasingly joined the big-government, big-spending, earmarking ranks." He's backing Rand Paul over Trey Grayson in the Kentucky U.S. Senate primary scheduled for May 18, and he's declined to endorse Senator McCain for re-election in Arizona.

The Obama administration has changed the rules to make it easier for labor unions to organize airline employees, the Washington Examiner notices.

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein has a new column in Forbes about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill: "any sensible impatience with a misguided environmental imperialism is beside the point in current tragedy. From the earliest times, every legal system has treated the discharge of these deadly substances into the environment as a legal wrong to public and private property alike. The only real dispute is over the choice of the remedies used to compensate for past losses and to prevent future similar harm to public and private lands and to the people and wildlife that use them."

George Packer writes in the "Comment" column of the New Yorker: "the perception has been established: this Administration will devote its energy to repairing relations with foreign governments, and will not risk them for the sake of human rights. Where the stakes are low, as in the West African nation of Guinea, the Administration speaks out against atrocities, with positive effect; but where there's a strategic interest, as in Ethiopia, which has jailed dozens of journalists and opposition politicians, the policy is mainly accommodation." In Egypt, for example, "the U.S. has reduced funding for programs that support local democracy activists, and, at Cairo's insistence, has cut most aid for civil-society organizations (such as independent election monitors) that are not officially registered—that is, groups that aren't tools of the regime."

We realize this is far afield from our usual subject matter here at the FutureOfCapitalism, but it struck us as newsworthy in terms of the American political climate in which Mr. Obama operates.

The state attorneys general suing to challenge the constitutionality of ObamaCare may have a better shot at winning than commonly thought, writes libertarian law professor Richard Epstein in the Wall Street Journal.

It's hard to figure out amid all the television footage of the soaring stock market and the rioting in Greece, but both an article in the Financial Times by Arvind Subramanian of the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a "Heard on the Street" item in today's Wall Street Journal argue that what's being "bailed out" by this European deal to rescue Greece isn't actually Greece itself but the holders of Greek government bonds, who include a lot of French and German banks. As the Journal puts it: "Any restructuring of Greek debt, for example, could force France and Germany to recapitalize some banks, according to Citigroup Chief Economist Willem Buiter. Banks in those countries have more than €110 billion ($140 billion) in Greek exposure, although Greek sovereign-debt holdings vary from bank to bank." And as Mr. Subramanian puts it:

David Gergen, the Yale graduate with a Harvard law degree who served in the Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton administrations and who now is a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, was last noticed here serving as a foil to Scott Brown. Mr. Gergen, moderating a debate for U.S. Senate candidates in Massachusetts, was the one who referred to "Teddy Kennedy's seat," giving Mr. Brown the chance to make his famous reply: "it's not the Kennedys' seat, and it's not the Democrats' seat, it's the people's seat."

Now Mr. Gergen has fetched up in the Sunday newspaper supplement Parade with a back-page article that makes some strong points:

Republicans now argue—with increasing justification—that we are creating more government than we need, more than we want, and certainly more than we are willing to pay for. Consider just a few statistics.

• Public spending by federal, state, and local government was 24% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 1950, 35% before the Great Recession, and could hit 44% this year.

Of the culprits blamed for the financial crisis, the politicians in Congress who passed a 2005 bankruptcy "reform" law haven't gotten much attention. But a new working paper from three economists -- Wenli Li of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, Michelle White of the University of California San Diego, and Ning Zhu of the University of California, Davis -- argues "the U.S. bankruptcy reform of 2005 played an important role in the mortgage crisis and the current recession." The abstract summarizes their findings as follows:

When debtors file for bankruptcy, credit card debt and other types of debt are discharged—thus loosening debtors' budget constraints. Homeowners in financial distress can therefore use bankruptcy to avoid losing their homes, since filing allows them to shift funds from paying other debts to paying their mortgages. But a major reform of U.S. bankruptcy law in 2005 raised the cost of filing and reduced the amount of debt that is discharged. We argue that an unintended consequence of the reform was to cause mortgage default rates to rise.

President Obama's reported choice of Elana Kagan for a seat on the Supreme Court had me thinking of Ms. Kagan's ultimately unsuccessful candidacy for the presidency of Harvard University a few years back. She was probably a little disappointed when the job instead went to Drew Faust. But it seems to have worked out okay for Ms. Kagan in the end. Sometimes losing just turns out to open the door to a better opportunity. For sheer prescience, it's hard to top the closing paragraph of Josh Gerstein's March 10, 2006 article about Ms. Kagan in the New York Sun, which ran under the headline, "As Harvard Seeks a President, Dean Kagan's Star Is Rising." The paragraph quoted a professor at Harvard Law School, Charles Fried, who served as solicitor general during the Reagan administration: