President Trump, commenting on a decline in the stock market, said, "I think the Fed is making a mistake. They are so tight. I think the Fed has gone crazy...Actually, it's a correction that we've been waiting for for a long time, but I really disagree with what the Fed is doing."

Trump will be ritualistically denounced for interfering with the Fed's much-prized "independence," but the truth is that under our Constitution the power "To coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures" is granted to neither the president nor the Fed but to Congress.

The long stock market upswing and the low unemployment of recent years have made grumbling about the Fed less fashionable than it was in, say, 2009 or 2010. But the lyrics of Hayek in the Hayek vs. Keynes Rap — "There's a boom and bust cycle and good reason to fear it" — are as relevant as they ever were.

Some staggering numbers in an upcoming grim New York Times Magazine article about the heroin epidemic in Philadelphia, Pa.: "The city's Department of Health estimates that 75,000 residents are addicted to heroin and other opioids...There had been more than 1,200 overdose deaths in Philadelphia in 2017 — a 34 percent rise from 2016."

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Preet Bharara and an SEC commissioner, Robert J. Jackson Jr., have an op-ed in the New York Times acknowledging "a good bit of insider trading law remains ambiguous" and describing "uncertainty," and "a legal haziness that leaves both investors and defendants unclear about what sorts of information-sharing or other activities by investors would be considered insider trading, and what are the acceptable forms of data-gathering and research that are part of any healthy, functioning financial marketplace."

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Former Treasury secretary and Harvard president Lawrence Summers reports on a recent road trip:

We were also struck by how remote the concerns of the coasts seemed. Televisions in bars and restaurants were rarely turned to news channels. No one seemed terribly concerned with the controversy over then-Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh. We saw 15 roadside signs opposing abortion for every other political sign of any kind....Americans want to live in very different ways. Perhaps more appreciation of that on the part of those who lead our society could strengthen and unify our country at what is surely a complex and difficult moment in its history.

Better to discover this late than never, I guess.

A New York Times feature article about what the newspaper calls the "dirtiest block" in the city of San Francisco observes, "For many who live here it's difficult to reconcile San Francisco's liberal politics with the misery that surrounds them."

That line made me smile. For many who don't live there — and even for some who do — it's precisely San Francisco's liberal politics that created the misery that the Times so vividly describes. Rent control and environmental regulations suppress housing supply, while generous welfare programs act as a magnet attracting people. That's not "difficult to reconcile." It's totally and entirely predictable.

Two articles in the sports section of today's New York Times disagree about the speed of the first pitch of last night's Yankees-Red Sox playoff game.

From the game story by Billy Witz: "Betts ripped the first pitch of the game — a 95-mile-per hour fastball — to deep center field."

Immigration reform is the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at Reason (here) and Newsmax (here).

The Rev. F. Washington Jarvis, who for 30 years was the headmaster of Roxbury Latin School, an independent school in Boston that was founded in 1645, has died, the school announced over the weekend.

I did not know Jarvis, but I know quite a few people who went through that school when he ran it, and parents who chose it for their boys, and they are uniformly impressive. Jarvis is the author of a book of collected speeches, With Love And Prayers: A Headmaster Speaks To The Next Generation. In the book and in other works, he makes the point that intelligence is not the same as wisdom, and that education is about character, meaning, virtue, even God, as much as about analysis. Here is Jarvis from a 2009 speech he gave in New Zealand:

After my column last week about Yale Law School, the Griswold v. Connecticut case, and the Kavanaugh nomination, National Review published a piece by Michael Knox Beran (author of an interesting book about Robert Kennedy), noting some other Yale angles in the situation, including Senator Cory Booker (Yale Law '97) and New Yorker writer Ronan Farrow (Yale Law '09).

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Harvard's new president, Lawrence Bacow, was formally installed on Friday afternoon. His speech (a full text of which is here), touched on several issues of significance beyond Harvard. Among them were the importance of reading news skeptically:

Now that technology has disintermediated the editorial function, allowing anybody to publish his or her own view of events, our fragmented media struggle to make the distinction between opinion and facts. The result, often, is a feverish diffusion of rumor, fantasy, and emotion unconstrained by reason or reality....Given the necessity today of thinking critically and differentiating the signal from the noise, a broad liberal arts education has never been more important. It is our responsibility to educate students to be discerning consumers of news and arguments, and to become sources of truth and wisdom themselves.

Free speech and intellectual diversity:

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The print edition of today's New York Times carries a special section on "life after college." The section leads off with an article offering personal finance advice based on the book All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan, by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi. Yes, that is the same Elizabeth Warren who is now a senator from Massachusetts and, to believe some news articles, at least, the leading Democratic candidate for president in 2020.