Over the post-Thanksgiving holiday weekend we took a family outing to the factory outlet mall in Wrentham, Mass. Wrentham is about a half hour away from Boston, vaguely near Gillette Stadium and in the direction of Cape Cod. It's the town that truck-driving Republican Scott Brown was from when he was elected to the U.S. Senate.

I've been shopping there for years. What was new on this visit was the proliferation of Chinese-language store signs throughout the mall. Here are two ads that were on display in the food court.

The ads are from Chinese banks offering credit cards. Remember, this isn't Flushing, Queens, or Chinatown in Manhattan, or San Francisco. It's Wrentham, Massachusetts.

From the New York Times, of all places, comes an article about how regulation contributes to income inequality:

...the escalation of land-use controls that drive up rents in desirable metropolitan areas; favoritism toward market incumbents via state occupational licensing regulations (for example, associations representing lawyers, doctors and dentists that block efforts allowing paraprofessionals to provide routine services at a lower price without their supervision).

These are just some of the causes contributing to the 1 percent's high and rising income share. Reforming relevant laws can make markets more efficient and egalitarian

Reagan nostalgia is the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at the New York Sun here or at Newsmax here.

Andrew Terhune has an interesting letter in the New York Times. He was responding to a Times op-ed proposing regionally varying minimum wages as opposed to a national, uniform minimum wage. He writes:

their proposal for different minimum wages in a country with "hundreds of different micro-economies" is not only exceedingly complex but also avoids the fundamental question: Why have a minimum wage at all?

The New York Times itself opined in a 1987 editorial, "The Right Minimum Wage: $0.00," that the minimum wage prices the working poor out of the job market. It still does. But it's also about choice. Shouldn't adults have the freedom to decide the price at which they are willing to exchange their labor with other adults? If we are pro-choice, we should be supporting the right of adults to make choices in all aspects of their lives, personal and economic.

The New York Times has an online feature called the Stone, "a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless." It is moderated by "Simon Critchley, who teaches philosophy at The New School for Social Research." The latest installment comes from Benjamin Y. Fong, "a faculty fellow at Barrett, the Honors College at Arizona State University." He writes:

Democrats are denouncing President Trump's decision to end the Temporary Protected Status program for 50,000 Haitians in the U.S.

The chair of the Democratic National Committee, Tom Perez, said: "Donald Trump's cruelty knows no bounds. ...As the proud son of two immigrants who fled a repressive regime, I'm disgusted at the president's heartlessness. With this decision, Trump is tearing families apart and turning his back on the values that have made America great."

Seth Moulton, a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, called the decision "bad for our American values."

That photograph of the Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, and his wife, Louise Linton holding a sheet of dollar bills is the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at the New York Sun (here) and Newsmax (here).

A long New York Times investigative article about why the New York City subway system has been plagued with delays and derailments reports, in part:

Subway workers now make an average of $170,000 annually in salary, overtime and benefits, according to a Times analysis of data compiled by the federal Department of Transportation. That is far more than in any other American transit system; the average in cities like Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington is about $100,000 in total compensation annually.

The pay for managers is even more extraordinary. The nearly 2,500 people who work in New York subway administration make, on average, $280,000 in salary, overtime and benefits. The average elsewhere is $115,000.

When Congress recently grilled executives from Facebook, Google, and Twitter about their role in spreading "fake news," maybe they should have invited someone from Amazon, too.

The Worcester Business Journal reports on a researcher at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute:

Funded by a $516,000 National Science Foundation award, assistant professor Kyumin Lee has developed algorithms that can detect fake "likes" and followers across different social platforms like Amazon, Facebook and Twitter.

Specifically, Lee's work targets crowdturfing, which is described as an online black market for false information including fake reviews, damaging tweets and fake news.

Lee, who joined WPI in July, first targeted sites like Amazon's Mechanical Turk, an online recruiting tool that has been used for crowdturfing campaigns.

David Brooks is probably right when he writes, as he did in his Friday column: "The crucial battleground is cultural and prepolitical."

And Matthew Continetti is probably right when he writes, as he did in his Saturday column:

When President Trump tweeted a criticism of Amazon for not collecting state sales taxes, the New York Times and Politifact "fact checkers" both emphatically rejected the claim as false.

Under the label "Fact Check," and the headline "Does Amazon Pay Taxes? Contrary to Trump Tweet, Yes," the Times' Linda Qiu wrote an article that said, "Mr. Trump's suggestion that Amazon does not pay taxes is false."

It further explained, "If Mr. Trump's point was that Amazon did not collect sales taxes — which are owed by the purchaser and collected by the retailer — it is true that the company once avoided doing so...But that criticism is outdated."

Politifact — "Winner of the Pulitzer Prize," the site brags on each article page — declared, "Trump's statement is inaccurate and ridiculous. We rate it Pants on Fire!"

Via John Cochrane and Tyler Cowen comes a piece by a blogger explaining how costly rules make it difficult for small operators to convert old urban buildings to more productive uses:

A family bought an old fire station a few years ago with the intention of turning it in to a Portuguese bakery and brew pub. They thought they'd have to retrofit the interior of the building to meet health and safety standards for such an establishment. Turns out, the cost of bringing the landscape around the outside of the building up to code was their primary impediment.

President Trump is considering appointing Mohamed El-Erian as vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, CNBC reports.

Before Mr. Trump goes ahead with that, I hope that he or someone advising him takes a look at the earlier coverage of Mr. El-Erian here at FutureOfCapitalism.

A 2013 column about President Obama's decision to name El-Erian as chairman of his "Global Development Council" pointed out:

El-Erian's reputation as a money manager is not without its blemishes. He did a brief tour—parts of 2006 and 2007—as the manager of Harvard University's endowment, leaving it ill-prepared for the economic downturn that ensued shortly thereafter.

President Trump is touting a focus on deregulation as one of his main accomplishments. He just may be right, I write in my column this week. Please check it out at Reason (here), the New York Sun (here), and Newsmax (here).

The leader of Israel's Labor Party, Avi Gabbay, gives an interview to Bloomberg News, which reports, "Gabbay seeks to portray himself as a reformer with business credentials who transcends traditional left-right politics, in the mold of French President Emmanuel Macron....He would....support tax cuts for working families and streamline bureaucracy and regulation."

There's often a gap between talking about this sort of thing as a candidate and doing it once actually elected. But there's certainly precedent for candidates from the left-leaning political parties making genuine progress on deregulation.