Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein's column this week is about the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman case: "it is clear that a second criminal prosecution is inappropriate. Martin's family of course still retains the option of a civil suit, at which Zimmerman could be put on the stand."

Democrats in Congress and their allies at the New York Times are readying another assault on Goldman Sachs, this time based on the claim that aluminum warehouses owned by Goldman are increasing the prices of canned beverages. 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 Occupy Money Cooperative, an outgrowth of the Alternative Banking Working Group of the Occupy Wall Street movement, says it is launching "The Occupy Card," which, for a fee of 99 cents a month, "will be an individual's debit card, a savings facility, and a 'virtual checkbook.'" The group's Website says "The Occupy Card will be offered through a bank, and so will be FDIC insured." The site doesn't say what bank is issuing The Occupy Card, but that will be interesting to see.

Here's one way to address, at least in part, the problem of the uninsured without forcing them all to buy health insurance. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports on Dr. Alan Kravitz, a surgeon with offices in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., who "set about constructing an Internet-based practice catering to uninsured patients with hernias. Where someone typically might pay $6,000 to $9,000 at a hospital to repair a hernia, he charges a flat $1,900 fee."
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Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein, who advises "several" hedge funds on the legal issues surrounding the government's seizure of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from their private shareholders, has a wonderful column on some of the very important issues involved.

The Washington consensus is for emphasizing highly skilled immigrants. My column this week argues that should not come at the expense of unskilled immigrants:

There was Sergei Brin, who arrived in America at age six as a refugee from the Soviet Union. He went on to co-found Google. Abraham Rosenthal came to America from Canada as a boy and became the editor of the New York Times. Max Frankel came to America from Germany at age 10; he, too became the editor of the New York Times. Andras Istvan Grof came to America from Hungary at age 20 and supported himself through City College in New York in part by working as a summer bus-boy at a New Hampshire resort hotel; he went on, as Andrew Grove, to co-found and lead the microchip-maker Intel.

My favorite low-skill immigrant story, however — at least my favorite one that does not involve my own great-grandparents or grandparents — is the case of one Israel Isidore Beilin.

The Tax Foundation has a post about the implications for tax policy of a new review of studies of diet soda. The review indicated diet soda may have negative health effects. Most of the proposed taxes on sugary drinks, including the tax and portion limit backed by Mayor Bloomberg, have exempted diet soda. From the Tax Foundation:

Using the tax code to try to influence personal decisions (especially ones as personal as nutrition choices) is difficult because the science is always changing as we learn more about health. Meanwhile, blanket tax policies only promote one government-approved option, when there are many combinations that might work to achieve a healthy lifestyle.

The Department of Agriculture is adding Greek yogurt to the subsidized school lunch program after Chobani, a company that makes Greek yogurt, hired lobbyists to make its case for inclusion. The Hill newspaper has the story (which I saw thanks to the astute Walter Olson). The Hill puts the lobbying expenditure at $80,000 so far this year, but that understates the expenditure; Senate lobbying records show Chobani has been paying Cornerstone Government Affairs $40,000 a quarter for four consecutive quarters, for a total of $160,000. The Cornerstone team, in turn, includes former staffers of both the agriculture department and the House and Senate agriculture committees.

The Martha's Vineyard Times has an account of how the Woods family has managed to reap the tax benefits of donating and granting a conservation restriction on a 485-acre property in Martha's Vineyard that is adjacent to their family vacation home while at the same time retaining enough control over the land that they can refuse to allow a hiking trail on the property. "We just prefer it in its natural state," Edward Woods Jr. is quoted by the Martha's Vineyard Times as saying.

The supermarket chain Wegmans is cutting its health benefits for part-time employees, apparently figuring that the employees and the employers will both be better off if the employees buy their own subsidized health insurance via the coming ObamaCare exchanges. The Buffalo News has the story.

President Obama had promised that if you like the health care you have now, it would be unaffected by his health care reform, so Mr. Obama's conservative or Republican critics can legitimately criticize him for either failing to predict this consequence or being dishonest about it. The flip side of that is that Republicans and conservatives have been pushing for a shift away from employer-provided health care to consumer-driven health care for years as a way of controlling costs and increasing choice, so they may be, at least in some sense, getting what they wished for.

Daniel Henninger has a Wall Street Journal column today making a connection between the size of government and its failures:

ObamaCare's problems are not unique. Important parts of the federal government are breaking down almost simultaneously.

The National Security Agency has conservative philosophers upset that its surveillance program is ushering in Big Brother. What's more concretely frightening is that a dweeb like Edward Snowden could download the content of the NSA's computers onto a thumb drive and walk out of the world's "most secretive" agency. Here's the short answer: The NSA has 40,000 employees. (Some say it's as high as 55,000, but it's a secret.)

Echoing that, when the IRS's audits of conservative groups emerged, the agency managers' defense was that the IRS is too big for anyone to know what its agents are doing. Thus both the NSA and IRS are too big to avoid endangering the public...

U.S. District Judge Denise Cote, a Clinton appointee, issued her ruling today in the case brought by the Justice Department accusing Apple of antitrust violations in pricing ebooks. It is a newsworthy ruling in many respects, but one, flagged by the subscription-only Publisher's Lunch, I found somewhat troubling. Her response to Apple's argument that a ruling against Apple would deter other potential new entrants to a market dominated by one major player, as the ebook market was dominated by Amazon before Apple's ruling, was essentially to say that the government, not market competition, should prevent monopoly behavior. From the ruling:

The vice chairman of corporate and investment banking and chairman of the financial strategy and solutions group at Citigroup, Peter Orszag, who was also director of President Obama's Office of Management and Budget, has a Bloomberg View op-ed proposing an increase in the tax on indoor tanning services:

In the Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration imposed a 10 percent excise tax on indoor tanning services to help pay for expanded health insurance coverage. The inspector general at the Treasury Department, however, reported in 2011 that the tax was being collected from less than half of the expected number of tanning facilities.

Treasury should more aggressively collect this tax, and Congress should consider raising it to 25 percent or even 50 percent.

The editor of National Review, Rich Lowry, and of The Weekly Standard, William Kristol, have a joint article out against the immigration reform bill that passed the Senate. They write:

Everyone professes to agree that our system should be tilted toward high-skilled immigration, but the Gang of Eight bill unleashes a flood of additional low-skilled immigration. The last thing low-skilled native and immigrant workers already here should have to deal with is wage-depressing competition from newly arriving workers. Nor is the new immigration under the bill a panacea for the long-term fiscal ills of entitlements, as often argued, because those programs are redistributive and most of the immigrants will be low-income workers.

President Obama slipped an endorsement of the movement to divest from fossil fuels into his big climate change speech the other day, the New York Times notices:

The White House is not elaborating on what the president meant at Georgetown by "divest," but the smoke signals seem to suggest that he sees direct parallels between the movement of the 1980s and the one today.