For all Americans eager for a return to economic normality, here’s some welcome news: Buybacks are back!

As The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, "after a year of hoarding cash, American corporations are ready to reward investors again."

And how. Citing a survey from Goldman Sachs, the Journal said that so far this year, American companies have bought back a tidy $504 billion of their own shares, which is the highest level of repurchases in at least the past 22 years. After watching their cash pile up during the past year of underinvestment, "we’re buying back stock because our cup runneth over," said JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon.

Some might quibble that it would be nice if Dimon and his fellow CEOs increased their companies’ investments at a similar pace. Instead, the Journal continues, "early signs from earnings season, however, indicate that capital expenditures aren’t at the top of executives’ minds," noting that in their quarterly earnings reports, they mentioned buybacks and dividends three times more than they mentioned diverting their cash to capital investments (much less the kind of domestic capital investments that the Biden administration is encouraging, and much much much less any pay increases for their workers).

Still, who can question that large-scale investors—often working without masks—were taking real risks in their frontline labor over the past year? As the plague circled around them, they stood by their posts. So good to see America’s CEOs (whose pay is linked to the increases in their companies’ share value which buybacks induce) rewarding these heroes of the plague year.

ALSO YESTERDAY, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case on the constitutionality of Mississippi’s anti-choice law, which was designed to blow up Roe v. Wade. The law bans almost all abortions after the first 15 weeks of pregnancy.

Mississippi is famed, of course, for its rich pro-life history. Without a sufficient number of pregnancies carried to full term, the state would surely have lacked for slaves and might not have been able to preside over so many lynchings of its citizens. (The critical mass required for a respectable lynch mob might have been harder to assemble as well.) In upholding the state’s new law, the Court could start a trend of using Mississippi as a model that other states could follow. It is, after all, one of just six states (five of them in the Deep South) with no minimum-wage law of its own, since try though it may, that’s as close as the state and its immediate neighbors could get to preserving their pre-1865 economies. And in murdering Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney (volunteers in the Freedom Summer voter registration campaign), the state prefigured today’s efforts to whiten the electorate.

We’ll soon learn if the Court wants to submit the nation to Mississippi rules.