Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein's column this week is about paid sick leave:

The hot-ticket item in the current labor market disputes is legislative mandates for paid sick leave. The unintended consequence of paid-sick leave legislation, whether in New York City or elsewhere, will be to block the creation of new jobs by limiting the deals that employers and employees are lawfully allowed to make with each other.

Amity Shlaes has a Tax Day Bloomberg View column about the Obama administration's plan to tax away your 401K or IRA if it gets larger than $3 million, which the Obama budget calls a "maximum permitted accumulation."

Amity Shlaes does a five-minute video interview with this Yahoo! News-ABC News program about her book Coolidge.

Bloomberg News has an article about hedge fund manager John Paulson's invitation to clients for a meeting about a fund "for investors looking to mitigate income taxes." The third paragraph of the article is this:

"He seems to be more focused on avoiding income taxes than on generating returns for his investors," said Brad Alford, head of Atlanta-based Alpha Capital Management LLC, who runs a mutual fund of funds that invests in hedge funds. "It gives billionaires a bad name."

A California State Senate committee reportedly has approved a bill that would strip the Boy Scouts of their tax exempt status unless they let in gays and atheists. There's also something in the bill about "gender identity," but it seems aimed not at forcing girls into the Boy Scouts but rather to have something to do with transgender individuals.

No matter what you think about the Boy Scouts, the prospect of lawmakers granting or revoking tax exemptions to groups on the basis of their membership policies seems at odds with the First Amendment. What about a religious youth group that doesn't accept atheists? This seems like one of those cases when the advocates of tolerance and inclusion themselves veer toward intolerance and exclusion.

President Obama's budget includes a proposal to explore selling off the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Depression-era government-owned electric utility. Republican senator Lamar Alexander opposes the idea, KnoxvilleBiz.com reports.

Tom Steyer, the California-based former hedge fund manager, is going to spend $400,000 on ads criticizing a Massachusetts Democrat running for U.S. Senate, Stephen Lynch, who supports the Keystone gas pipeline, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Somehow all the "let's get money out of politics" folks who were so vocal in their opposition when it was Sheldon Adelson or David Koch spending money to support Republican or free-market ideas or candidates seem silent when it is an anti-global-warming, pro-"green"-energy California billionaire who is the one doing the political spending. It's a classic double standard, in which political spending by rich people is a grave threat to democracy, but the threat is only worth mentioning when the spending is done in support of right-wing causes.

The front-page New York Times obituary of Robert Edwards, the Nobel laureate co-inventor of in vitro fertilization — a technique to which 5 million people owe their lives — reports, "denied government support, the men resorted to private financing."

"In 1971, Dr. Edwards's application for research support from the British government was turned down… The two men obtained private funds and continued their work."

I'm not saying that the federal government should eliminate all medical or scientific research funding. But the next time someone makes the argument that any cuts in the budget for federal medical research means that the medical breakthroughs will not happen, the story of Robert Edwards and test-tube babies is a pretty good comeback.

President Obama's budget is out today with a barrage of tax increases that Bloomberg News estimates would increase taxes by a net $1 trillion over ten years. Among the president's proposed tax hikes, as outlined in a Treasury department press release:

An increase in the tobacco tax to about $1.95 a pack of cigarettes from $1.01, raising $78 billion over 10 years.

A change in the estate tax rates that were part of the fiscal cliff deal reached in January, raising the rate to 45% and lowering the exclusion to $3.5 million, raising $72 billion over 10 years.

The president of Bowdoin College, Barry Mills, has issued a feisty response to the National Association of Scholars report criticizing Bowdoin, calling it "nonsense," "mean-spirited and personal."

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein proposes that the employment situation might be improved by laying off some regulators:

fire every worker who administers the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 and to supply each of them with a one-year severance package that will allow them time to secure reentry into a labor market that is sure to expand without the benefit of their destructive oversight services.

….To the President, the right question to ask is: Which form of government intervention can do most to improve the economy? The one answer that he will not accept is deregulation, which, both in the long and short run, is the only solution to the current woes.

Meanwhile, in higher education news that doesn't have to do with Bowdoin College, Harvard is reportedly standing by its decision to invite the rapper Tyga to be the headline attraction at a college-sponsored event.

The not-fit-for-printing-here lyrics of the Tyga tune "Rack City" are among the reasons many students have called for the event to be canceled.

George Will, call your office!

I got a fine education at Harvard and met a lot of people there that I like, but this a case that people will point to when they say that if America is going down the tubes, it's our self-described elite educational institutions that are leading the way. How did Harvard move so quickly from the Krokodiloes to Tyga?

Mike Allen's Politico Playbook reports: "Robert Rivkin, general counsel at the Transportation Department and longtime friend of the Obamas from Chicago, is headed to Delta Airlines to become Senior Vice President for International and Regulatory Affairs, based in Washington."

The post here over the weekend about Bowdoin College neglected to mention a Bloomberg View column by Amity Shlaes that helps to make sense of the situation and that got to the story before the Wall Street Journal did.

Bloomberg has a news article on "a push in more than a dozen states to recognize gold and silver coins as legal tender." Among the developments: in Texas, "lawmakers are considering a measure supported by Republican Governor Rick Perry to establish the Texas Bullion Depository to store gold bars valued at about $1 billion and held in a New York bank warehouse."

And USA Today has an editorial making the case that "low interest rates — engineered by the Federal Reserve's program of flooding money into credit markets" have "perverse side effects and unintended consequences. The biggest of these, as it relates to housing, is that artificially low rates make banks reluctant to lend."