The editor of the American Spectator, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., was once having dinner with Robert Bartley, the longtime editor of the Wall Street Journal; me, and my partner in the New York Sun, Seth Lipsky, when Seth remarked on how phenomenally well-read Tyrrell is.

Bartley remarked in the most constructive and encouraging way possible that this wasn't always clear from reading Mr. Tyrrell's column, which we carried in the Sun.

Alas, Bartley did not live to see the appearance of Mr. Tyrrell's new book, After The Hangover: The Conservative' Road to Recovery. If he had, though, I think he'd have read it and come away marveling at Mr. Tyrrell's feat in pulling off, in the course of a relatively slim book, an impressive feat, a thoughtful, learned, and accessible extended essay that is part memoir, part intellectual history, part political philosophy and part prescription of policy and practice.

While the government is on the case of the banks in an effort to make financial products more simple for consumers, it's easy to forget that the government is right up there with the banks when it comes to impenetrable small print disclosures for financial products. A case in point: today's mail brought a "program brochure and tuition savings agreement" from the 529 College Savings Program administered by the state of New York. Thirty-four large pages of very small print.

When it's raining out, some friends of mine joke about doing the "Bob Rubin dance" -- managing to make it in between the raindrops without ever getting wet.

I just got done watching Mr. Rubin's testify this morning before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, and, well, while he wasn't soaked, Mr. Rubin certainly got damp. Highlights:

Mr. Rubin, without directly quoting Jamie Dimon's explanation that a financial crisis is "something that happens every five to seven years," echoed it, saying, "As long as we've had capital markets, we've had crises."

He tried to place blame on the company's risk managers, saying, "They saw triple-A securities and saw de minimis risk."

He echoed Lloyd Blankfein and Rodgin Cohen in calling for stricter capital requirements. "Leverage constraints have to be substantially increased," he said.

He said the story about him opposing the regulation of derivatives while Treasury secretary is false. "I was not opposed to regulation of derivatives, quite the contrary," he said.

The Commentary magazine blog, Contentions, has published a post from me about the apparent contradiction of President Obama twice distancing himself from Zbigniew Brzezinski during the presidential campaign, and now taking advice from him in the White House.

Nice to see the Wall Street Journal quoting David Berman, the husband of a former New York Sun and Forward colleague of mine. Too bad the paper can't even spell the name of his fund correctly, rendering Durban Capital, named after the city in South Africa, incorrectly as Durbin Capital, like the Democratic senator from Illinois. Maybe they will fix it online sometime later today.

We've been writing (here and here) about the increasing numbers of Americans who pay no federal taxes. The latest data point comes in an Associated Press article that the Washington Examiner notices.

It begins, "Tax Day is a dreaded deadline for millions, but for nearly half of U.S. households it's simply somebody else's problem. About 47 percent will pay no federal income taxes at all for 2009. Either their incomes were too low, or they qualified for enough credits, deductions and exemptions to eliminate their liability."

Comments the Examiner's Mark Hemingway, "half the population having no financial stake in how this country is governed is not a good thing."

George Will has an excellent column on the auto bailout, pointing out that an "initial" public offering of the new General Motors could value the company at $50 billion, or more than Ford. Writes Mr. Will: "This is justice under today's state capitalism: Ford took on $23.6 billion in debt to avoid becoming dependent on Washington, whereas GM shed much of its debt by becoming dependent."

More great details from the column, which relies in part on Paul Ingrassia's book Crash Course: the contracts between the United Auto Workers and the automakers were "so complex that the table of contents of the contract was almost 20 pages long."

"Expect to hear about how callous and greedy owners of coal mines put their own profits ahead of the safety of workers." -- FutureOfCapitalism.com, April 6, 9:47 a.m.

"Anger is building against the mine's owner, the Massey Energy Company, which has long been accused by its critics of putting profits before the welfare of its workers." -- New York Times editorial, April 7.

Peter Osnos of The Century Foundation has a gem of a column this week on what he calls "five guys": Bill Gates (Microsoft), Steve Jobs (Apple), Jeff Bezos (Amazon) and Sergey Brin and Larry Page (Google). "Theirs is by no means the only narrative of our times, but it is certainly one of the more hopeful ones," he writes.

The column itself falls into the tendency to think about companies as the products of individuals rather than teams, and to focus on the founders rather than the executors (Steve Ballmer, Eric Schmidt) or the system that made it possible. But it's a gem of a column.

Goldman Sach's ceo, Lloyd Blankfein, and its president, Gary Cohn, are out with their annual letter to shareholders. The sentence that most caught my eye was this: "Given that much of the financial contagion was fueled by uncertainty about counterparties' balance sheets, we support measures that would require higher capital and liquidity levels." This explanation sheds some light on what puzzled me back in December, when H. Rodgin Cohen, who represents a lot of financial institutions, said regulators should require tougher capital requirements. I said back then, "After all, nothing is stopping the banks from increasing their capital requirements or upping risk controls internally on their own, without a government mandate."

Thomas Sowell's new column: "It so happens that whites were turned down for mortgage loans at a higher rate than Asian Americans, but that fact seldom made it into the newspaper headlines or the political rhetoric. Nor did either the mainstream media or political leaders mention the fact that black-owned banks turned down black mortgage loan applicants at least as often as white-owned banks did."

Talk of secession -- states or Americans getting so fed up with Washington that they try to split away -- has been the subject of earlier posts on this site here, here and here. Now columnist Walter Williams writes: "I believe we are nearing a point where there are enough irreconcilable differences between those Americans who want to control other Americans and those Americans who want to be left alone that separation is the only peaceable alternative." Mr. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University who has a Ph.D. in economics from UCLA.

News of the death of 25 coal miners in West Virginia is a disaster and a human tragedy, and before going on to any policy points, it is worth pausing to reflect on the lives lost.

But if the past is any guide, the mine disaster will also become an argument about the problems of capitalism. Expect to hear about how callous and greedy owners of coal mines put their own profits ahead of the safety of workers.

The particulars of the owner and the mine in this case will no doubt be examined exhaustively, and you can also expect to hear calls for more and better regulation of mine safety.

Pajamas Media has published an article I wrote about the state of markets and market-makers for carbon offsets. Pajamas Media readers, welcome to FutureOfCapitalism.com. Please consider bookmarking us, subscribing to our RSS feed, or signing up for our free daily mailing list. You can also follow us on Twitter or Facebook.

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein's latest weekly Forbes column is up, about how state regulators in Maine and Massachusetts are rejecting requests by health insurer's for rate increases. In Massachusetts, "Gov. Deval Patrick's insurance commission blocked 235 of the 274 requested increases." In Maine, the insurance commissioner, Mila Kofman, "followed the recommendation of Maine Attorney General Janet Mills to limit the large insurer Anthem by a premium increase of 10.9%, not the 18.5% that it had requested." He argues that health insurance is different from industries such as railroads or electricity where providers can have monopoly power: "Open entry eliminates persistent excessive returns." In other words, if the government just lets the insurers keep raising rates, eventually someone will come along, enticed by the profit motive, and offer to do it cheaper.

"Only competitive markets prized by classical liberals have the long term sustainability that reckless progressives rightly seek," he says.