From a news article in today's Boston Globe about the racial composition of the City of Boston's workforce:

Newly hired employees fill out forms, Leonard said, that ask them to indicate their gender and to identify their race or ethnicity in one of five categories set by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Almost all new workers check a box, Leonard said, and the employment commission recommends visual observations for those who do not.

Sure enough, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity web site, in a question and answer section, contains the following:

Q: What should an employer do if an employee refuses to self-identify using the new race and ethnic categories?

The Commonwealth of Virginia's department of motor vehicles has reportedly sent cease and desist letters to Uber and Lyft, ordering the smartphone-app-based ridesharing services to stop operating in the Old Dominion. It's an all-too-typical approach by politicians and bureaucrats of demanding that new businesses get a government okay before operating, rather than allowing consumers or individuals to make their own choices about whether to patronize these services.

Uber reportedly just raised another $1.2 billion at a valuation of $18.2 billion, so a lot of investors seem to be betting that ultimately consumer choice will win out over the political obstacles.

Dr. Benjamin Carson's new book One Nation and his potential as a 2016 presidential candidate are the subject of an article I wrote for Newsweek. The pioneering Johns Hopkins University brain surgeon who electrified conservatives with his speech at last year's National Prayer Breakfast talked to me over the phone in an interview for the story. Please check the Newsweek article out here.

Just how anti-Walmart is New York's City Council? More than half of the council's members — 26 of 51 — signed a letter demanding that Walmart and the Walton Family Foundation stop giving charitable donations to New York City charities, the New York Post reports.

Michael Bloomberg is the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here). It also got picked up by Politico Playbook.

From the corrections column of the New York Times:

An article on Monday about the New York Public Library's revised renovation plan for the Mid-Manhattan Library and the flagship Fifth Avenue building misstated the projected cost of updating the stacks at that building. It is $46 million, not $24 million.

From the now-corrected article itself:

Anthony W. Marx, the library's president, said the historic stacks in the main building, whose removal was a disputed element in the original plan designed by the architect Norman Foster, would be kept, but not returned to service as a storage area for books.

My April 2013 column on the booming business of "compliance" turns out to have been prescient, at least to judge by the story of one successful entrepreneur. The Wall Street Journal's venture capital blog reports that Zenefits Insurance Services recently raised $66.5 million in two weeks at a $500 million valuation in a round led by the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. From the Journal:

Mr. Conrad discovered the frustration and difficulty of HR–administering payroll and benefits for employees while at the same time complying with increasingly burdensome government regulations–at his last startup, the investment management company SigFig Wealth Management LLC.

After his experience at SigFig, he told VentureWire in January, the Obama administration's 800-page Affordable Care Act, which employers will have to comply with by next year, looked like "a whirlwind coming down the pike."

The smearing of Carl Icahn by a leak of an investigation involving trading in Clorox before an Icahn takeover bid is just the latest example of how regulators and prosecutors are going too far in their campaign on these issues. A Bloomberg article notes:

Hypothetically at least, a leaker of confidential information doesn't need to know the person who ultimately traded on it to be party to illegal trading. In many of the 85 insider-trading prosecutions and guilty pleas recently won in the Southern District of New York, the illegal trades were done by remote tippees who'd received the information second, third, or even fifth hand.

"Fifth hand"!

The New York Times coverage makes clear Mr. Icahn's real sin:

Others have pointed out that his new form of activism is motivated by self-interest.

The Washington Examiner (here), Glenn Reynolds in USA Today (here), and the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (here) have news of how the Justice Department tried to pressure banks and payment processors to stop doing business with payday lenders and other businesses not popular with the Obama administration.

Said the Committee's chairman, Darrell Issa: "Operation Choke Point is the Justice Department's newest abuse of power...If the administration believes some businesses should be out of business, they should prosecute them before a judge and jury. By forcibly conscripting banks to do their bidding, the Justice Department has avoided any review and any check on their power."

The Commerce Department reported today a second estimate of real GDP for the first quarter of 2014, finding that the economy "decreased at an annual rate of 1.0 percent." In other words, we were running at a growth rate of negative one percent. That is somewhere between pathetic and lame.

The left will probably find a way to blame this on income inequality, "austerity" by House Republicans, and George W. Bush. But surely the onset of ObamaCare and the Obama tax increases have had something to do with it? It'd be a mistake to read too much into one estimate of one quarter, but it may be starting to look like we're seeing part of the effect of a Congress and a president that have delegated growth to the Federal Reserve instead of pursuing and enacting their own policies to promote growth.

Vox has some fine coverage, including an on-the-record interview with a senior vice president at Oracle, Ken Glueck, who calls the whole thing "frankly astounding."

Libertarian (or classical liberal) law professor Richard Epstein's column this week is about reparations for African-Americans. He's against them.

Just in time for Summer vacation, the IRS is hatching a plan to toughen the tax treatment of airline frequent flyer miles and hotel loyalty reward programs. That's the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here).

The Financial Times reports:

The data underpinning Professor Piketty's 577-page tome, which has dominated best-seller lists in recent weeks, contain a series of errors that skew his findings. The FT found mistakes and unexplained entries in his spreadsheets...

The central theme of Prof Piketty's work is that wealth inequalities are heading back up to levels last seen before the first world war. The investigation undercuts this claim, indicating there is little evidence in Prof Piketty's original sources to bear out the thesis that an increasing share of total wealth is held by the richest few.

Tax Prof blogger Paul Caron follows up my earlier post about Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s below-market-rate NYU housing with a post of his own. He writes: