In an editorial supporting Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination, the Wall Street Journal writes, "He has spent 26 years in public service instead of cashing in as a Beltway lawyer."

Regardless of where you stand on Kavanaugh's nomination, it's a sad day when even the Wall Street Journal is characterizing working for the government as "public service" in favorable juxtaposition with working for the private-sector economy. Who is performing a greater public service, really? Government lawyers? Or lawyers representing private individuals and companies who are creating jobs and wealth and often defending against excessive regulations or overreaching prosecutors?

It would be refreshing, actually, if some president were to nominate a corporate general counsel or a partner in a large law firm to the Supreme Court. It might add some useful perspective that is currently lacking.

Reviewing Michael Lewis's new book The Fifth Risk, New York Times critic Jennifer Szalai writes that Lewis renders "even the most abstruse details of government risk assessment in the clearest (and therefore most terrifying) terms. He asks a handful of former public servants, now living as private civilians, what they fear might happen if Trump continues his haphazard approach to staffing the federal government. Their answers include an accidental nuclear catastrophe and the privatization of public goods, like government loans and drinking water."

The business section of today's New York Times carries an article written and reported in collaboration with ProPublica reporting that the CEO of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, Craig Thompson, is quitting the boards of two for-profit companies.

The Times reports:

Dr. Thompson has served on the board of Merck, the maker of the blockbuster cancer drug Keytruda, since 2008. He has been on the board of Charles River Laboratories, a publicly traded company that assists research in early drug development, since 2013.

Yale Law School, Griwsold v. Connecticut, and President Trump's Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh are the subject of my column this week. Please check it out at the New Boston Post (here), Reason (here), and the New York Sun (here).

One of the Reason commenters asked if the Senators actually asked Kavanaugh about Griswold during the confirmation hearing. According to ScotusBlog, Kavanaugh was asked about it, and responded that he found Justice White's concurrence a persuasive opinion. White, by the way, went to Yale Law School too. White's opinion in Griswold relied on the 14th Amendment rather than on Justice Douglas's "penumbras, formed by emanations."

If recent events point to the prescience of the print New York Sun, they also reminded me, as if I needed reminding, of the brilliance of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Moynihan spoke in 1967 — in what became his book Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding — about "the ambiguous role of the FBI, to which, mindlessly, the elite in both situations turned over custody of its most serious political problems."

I'm not quarreling with the idea of delaying a vote on Kavanaugh to allow for further investigation. It's not entirely clear to me, though, that the FBI is the right agency to do it. What is clear is that Moynihan was on to something.

After watching the Senate Judiciary Committee's hearing about a sexual assault allegation against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, it occurred to me that there's yet another way — in addition to the ways I mentioned in my column earlier this week — that the decade-old print New York Sun turns out to be an excellent guide to the Trump era. The Sun published a four-part series on youth binge drinking, It reported, in part:

activities often include attending alcohol-laden parties at their classmates' homes....The direct health consequences of binge drinking include liver damage, elevated risk for heart disease, and reduced brain performance, but alcohol intoxication is also a leading cause of car accidents, homicides, suicides, violence, and sexual assault, Dr. Ross said.

The tenth anniversary of the New York Sun's cessation of print publication is the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at the New York Sun online (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here). I also participated in a podcast about this issue; the audio and a transcript are here.

When President Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress enacted a new tax on large private college endowments, it was widely interpreted in part as political payback by Republicans for higher education's leftist tilt. Now, though, the Democratic Party's nominee for governor of Massachusetts, Jay Gonzalez, who served in the administration of Democrat Deval Patrick, wants to levy a similar tax. WBUR reports:

His proposal would levy a 1.6 percent tax on private colleges with endowments in excess of $1 billion.

The tax would currently apply to nine schools in Massachusetts: Harvard University, MIT, Williams College, Boston College, Amherst College, Wellesley College, Boston University, Smith College and Tufts University.

Harvard and MIT would pay $563 million and $210 million, respectively, under the plan, according to the Gonzalez campaign.

In total, the campaign estimates the tax would generate $1 billion a year.

Some things don't quite add up about hedge fund manager Seth Klarman's interview with the New York Times in which he discloses that he will spend between $18 million and $20 million this election cycle on helping Democrats "because I think democracy is at stake."

For one, part of the idea of "democracy" is that every person gets a more or less equal voice in electing our leaders. One person, one vote. Yet here Klarman, because he's rich, is proposing to use his money to sway the outcome of the election. When the Koch brothers or Sheldon Adelson do this to elect Republicans, Democrats denounce it as profoundly undemocratic. One might argue that the end of electing Democrats justify doing so by undemocratic means. But in the Times article, there's a whole paragraph in which Klarman rejects ends-justify-means thinking when it comes to President Trump:

The mismatch between the Trump administration's poll numbers and its positive results on the two big issues — peace and prosperity — is the topic of my column this week. Please check the full column out at the New York Sun here and at Newsmax here.

The Economist's 175th anniversary "leader," or what Americans call an editorial, headlined "A Manifesto For Renewing Liberalism," includes plenty of wisdom, not least the advice that liberals, "must stop sneering at nationalism, but claim it for themselves and fill it with their own brand of inclusive civic pride. Rather than lodging power in centralised ministries and unaccountable technocracies, they should devolve it to regions and municipalities."

Of all the images of the Jewish New Year, the video on Facebook of Mark Zuckerberg blowing the shofar is the one that for some reason I just can't shake.

Amanda Ripley, writing in the Atlantic, takes a long and thorough look at the cost of college in America and concludes:

Ultimately, college is expensive in the U.S. for the same reason MRIs are expensive: There is no central mechanism to control price increases. "Universities extract money from students because they can," says Schleicher at the OECD. "It's the inevitable outcome of an unregulated fee structure." In places like the United Kingdom, the government limits how much universities can extract by capping tuition. The same is true when it comes to health care in most developed countries, where a centralized government authority contains the prices.

The U.S. federal government has historically been unwilling to perform this role. So Americans pay more for pharmaceuticals—and for college classes.

Some illuminating background from the New York Times about detaining child immigrants:

The Trump administration moved on Thursday to remove court-imposed time limits on the detention of migrant children, proposing to end 20 years of judicial oversight ...If approved, the new regulation would upend a body of rules for detaining migrant children that has been in place since 1997. Multiple administrations have challenged the rules, which stem from a consent decree in a federal class-action lawsuit over the physical and emotional harm done to children held in jail-like settings for extended periods....

The 1997 consent decree was reached after advocates successfully argued that federal detention was damaging, physically and emotionally, to children's health and limited their access to legal counsel. In 2016, the courts extended the settlement to apply not only to children who were crossing the border alone, but to migrant families.

If the Democrats succeed in taking over the House of Representatives in the midterm elections, part of the reason will be an approach more commonly associated with Republicans — decentralization and local decision-making.

The New York Times reported last month that the Democrats are "leaving it to candidates to tailor their own messages to their districts" and "have concluded that a unified campaign framework emanating from Capitol Hill would do more harm than good."

From the Times:

"We trust our candidates to know their districts and the challenges facing their communities better than anyone," said Representative Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, the chairman of the House Democrats' campaign arm.

He sounds like F.A. Hayek.