Not only does “Freddie Freeloader” (on Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue album) have what might be Trane’s best solo, I think it also has what might be Miles’ best.  It’s certainly one of his swingingest.  
Cannonball’s solo on that track is great too.  The contrast among the three solos is interesting. 
I guess this means I need to restart blogging on my music blog.

For your edification and amusement (hopefully), my monthly newsletter has been posted in the publications section of my firm’s web site, deconcinimcdonald.com.  
It’s a twofer this month, in that I found a story that combines two of my favorite subjects, tax and land use law.  There’s also a short item about something that caught my eye on a tax aspect of retirement planning.  You’ll want to read the whole thing, I promise.  
If you would like to receive my newsletter via snail mail, just let me know.  All of my contact information is on the home page of this site, as well as on my bio page at deconcinimcdonald.com.

A French economist is apparently trying to make the argument that an “optimal inheritance tax rate might be as large as 55%-70%,” but I honestly cannot understand any of the rest of the description of his paper.  Maybe you have to be an economist to know what he means by “we estimate simultaneously timing responses in the short and medium-term using an innovative bunching approach” and “we use a difference-in-differences approach to estimate real and shifting among asset portfolio responses.” 

Further to my post yesterday, I saw another post written by the Antiplanner, but this time at the Cato Institute blog, about the cost of housing.  He points out something that I have noticed but I think is largely overlooked: just because an organization calls itself “non-profit” doesn’t necessarily mean that it doesn’t have highly compensated employees and is expending the majority of its resources on supporting whatever constituency it purports to support.  In some cases at least, the main constituency of such organization is really its own employees.

As usual, the Antiplanner is discussing what causes high housing costs in certain urban areas.  He thinks land use restrictions are a major contributor.  That makes sense to me.

​A presidential candidate has brought up the idea, which I have written about in the past, that the Postal Service could expand the services it provides to include consumer financial services.  This idea has been pitched as a way to both improve the availability of small-dollar banking services for consumers and bolster the financial condition of the Postal Service.
Maybe I’m missing something, but if the banks can’t make a profit from providing small-dollar services to consumers, how will the Postal Service make a profit from providing those services?

Recently, we received a solicitation through a web site that sends referrals to my firm.  The web site is run by a first-rate professional organization.  That’s probably why I didn’t immediately reject this solicitation even though I should have.
Why should I have rejected the solicitation?  Because it used the same odd wording as the scam emails that I receive daily.  The emails are from people posing as prospective clients who are looking to scam lawyers.  Several months ago I posted about one such solicitation that got written up in the American Bar Association Journal.
Instead of rejecting the solicitation, I responded as I usually do to contacts through that web site, by sending an email inviting the prospective client to set up a consultation.  When a reply came back with more of the same wording that’s in the scam emails, my suspicions had already been aroused.  I didn’t respond.
I get those scammer emails every day.  I should have known the same junk would start getting to me through other methods soon enough.  

​As anyone who understands baseball stats will know, if you go 0-fer long enough, your batting average is never going to recover.  You’ll never get back above the Mendoza line.  That’s what I thought of when I saw this item on the home page of Lowering the Bar today:

I know it’s inside baseball (if I may mix my metaphors), but I have been following the news about Dewey & LeBoeuf with some interest.  Dewey & LeBoeuf was a very large law firm that went out of business a few years ago, leaving a huge amount of unpaid debt.  Three of the executives of the firm (not all of whom were lawyers) ended up getting prosecuted for allegedly misleading the firm’s creditors.  
I think the story is interesting to me mostly because it’s so far removed from my experience as a lawyer.  I can’t get my head around the idea that a law firm would raise capital by selling bonds, as if it was General Motors or General Electric.  
As for the prosecutors who went 0-for-151, will they get sent down to the minors?

This post at the Cato blog talks about the burning questions of whether or not state and local governments should protect their citizens from the dangers of self-service gas stations and food trucks by banning those forms of commerce.
The issue with the food trucks was not, apparently, whether they were a health or safety hazard.  No, the issue was their threat to the businesses of restaurant operators.
The self service gas station ban is a mystery to me.  I can’t remember how long ago it was that gas station attendants disappeared around here.  There are places where they still exist?
The food truck ban is obviously protecting the economic interests of a narrow constituency.  The self service gas ban doesn’t seem to have even that justification.  
Why should governments be banning commercial arrangements that are obviously no threat to public health or safety?

As I have said before, just because someone has a platform on the internet for expressing his opinions doesn’t mean those opinions have more validity than any others.  And just because some opinionated person comes up with his own reason for wanting something doesn’t necessarily mean that the thing they want is bad.
What am I talking about?  Some people have suggested that if there are self-driving cars, there could be fewer vehicles per capita, since fleets of them could be on hand to be deployed only when called upon.  This would mean less traffic, less pollution, fewer cars being built, and safer streets.  Those are all worthy goals, in my opinion.  
A few commentators have taken the idea one step further and suggested that self driving cars would, if deployed communally and not owned individually, eliminate the need for personally controlled transportation and, consequently, make it possible to eliminate individually driven vehicles.  Naturally, a few commentators have reacted negatively to the suggestion that individual driving would be banned.  
It’s all a bit involved for me.  I’m not going to get into the political implications of it.  I think driverless cars will be good for individuals and for our country.  I’m going to leave it at that.
Via Instapundit.