Some of the most exciting tax policy action these days is happening at the state level, and you can really see some of the differences that party control makes.

In Indiana, where the Republicans control the legislature and the governorship, the fight between Governor Pence and the legislature is over how much to cut taxes. Mr. Pence reportedly wants to cut taxes by $500 million a year; a local news outlet reports that "Pence wanted lawmakers to slash the income tax from 3.4 percent to 3.06 percent, but Senate Republicans opted to reduce it to 3.3 percent."

The British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who died today, is the topic of my column this week. Please read it at Reason (here) or Newsmax (here).

The Wall Street Journal also has an editorial up, as does the the New York Sun.

Also, amid the appreciation and nostalgia for Thatcher, it's worth remembering that even the greatest politicians are still politicians, and they sometimes disappoint. Thatcher once pledged, "The National Health Service is safe in our hands."

A lovely case study of diversity on campus — or the lack of it, when it comes to ideology — is under way at Bowdoin College, thanks to Thomas Klingenstein, who wrote about it here in April 2011 in the Claremont Review.

The National Association of Scholars has a report out titled "What Does Bowdoin Teach?"

The Manhattan Institute had a lively event about it last week; a video is here.

The Wall Street Journal's David Feith had an article about it summarizing the situation.

And the Bowdoin Orient, the student newspaper, carries the college's official response to the NAS report.

The front page of WSJ.com carries an announcement from the editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal announcing the launch of "Risk & Compliance Journal" whose content "spans the latest laws and regulations."

There's something Orwellian about the very term "compliance," which makes going along with what the government tells you to do into a kind of virtue. That's not to fault the Journal — it's clear that this is a growth area.

But it will be a sign of health in both the economy and the body politic when our leading newspapers start launching new sections devoted to "contrarianism" or "skepticism" or "troublemaking" rather than "compliance."

[UPDATED below with comments from Mr. Rattner.] The Martha's Vineyard Times has a dispatch about a three-way real estate deal involving the money manager, former Obama administration official, and New York pension-fund-scandal-figure Steven Rattner, his Martha's Vineyard farmer neighbor, and the Martha's Vineyard Land Bank, which is funded by a tax on the island's real estate transactions.

In the deal, the Land Bank bought 13 acres in West Tisbury and an agricultural preservation restriction on an additional 25 acres for $3,450,000. The Land Bank borrowed the money from Mr. Rattner and will repay it over nine years "at terms and rates comparable to those now paid by municipalities of between one and two percent," the Times reports.

A reader comment on the Martha's Vineyard Times site, upvoted by four readers, has about the same reaction I did:

Phil Gramm, the former Republican senator from Texas and former vice chairman of UBS, has an intelligent letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal poking some additional holes in John Steele Gordon's op-ed about the taxation of carried interest earned by hedge fund managers.

So writes Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal.

After two op-eds in three days in the New York Times calling for an increase in the taxes that managers of investment funds pay on carried interest, and after a PBS program that dwelled on the issue, the Wall Street Journal gets into the act today with an op-ed piece by John Steele Gordon that also calls for increasing the tax.

Mr. Gordon writes: " Managers of these funds are compensated for their services in two ways. One is the annual management fee, usually 1% or 2% of a client's investment. The other is a share in the net profits of the fund's long-term investments. That share is often 30% or even more."

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein's column this week is about Joseph Bruno, the former Republican leader in the New York State Senate. Professor Epstein says prosecutors have gone too far in prosecuting Mr. Bruno for honest services fraud, risking a violation of the constitutional prohibition against double jeopardy. He writes:

The major lesson from the Bruno case has nothing to do with his guilt or innocence. What matters here is the legal framework in which those issues are decided. Every public official and private citizen should embrace the basic libertarian provision that state power is an evil until it is shown to be a good. There are many good reasons why the Bill of Rights is filled with explicit guarantees against the abuses of the criminal process. All criminal procedure is always a delicate balance between the state's need to control against violence and abuse, and the abuse that it can all too easily commit through excessive prosecutorial zeal, which is not checked by close judicial scrutiny.

"It's tax time. Go get your refund!" say the signs in the New York subway featuring a smiling family.

They are an indication of a big change in the fundamental deal between government and the people, from one in which tax season was an time Americans sent money to the government, to one in which Americans get money, or at least feel like they do. This is the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at the New York Sun (here) and Newsmax (here).

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Fisker, an electric car company that received a $529 million loan from the Department of Energy in 2009, has reportedly hired a lawyer to advise on a possible bankruptcy filing and has furloughed its U.S. workforce to preserve cash.

This site has been having some fun (see here, here, and here) with some of the more extreme examples of California's Proposition 65 warnings (as has Overlawyered.com). The latest example came on a potato-peeler that I purchased (more Passover preparation) not in California but in New York City.

The label on the front of the package says "Warning: This product contains chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm."

A Bloomberg News dispatch raises the possibility that France's socialist president, Francois Hollande, may move to simplify or reduce the government-imposed rules in France, "one of the world's most-regulated countries." The rules govern, among other things, the length of baguettes, which must "measure between 21.6 inches and 25.6 inches."

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein writes about the Supreme Court cases on gay marriage:

Writers like me are required to choose between an originalism that cuts strongly against any recognition of gay marriage, and a libertarianism that cuts equally strongly in the opposite direction. The side of me that embraces fidelity to the Constitution strongly hopes for a legislative solution that may be soon coming. That solution answers the concern that a new legal regime favoring gay marriage will be foisted on an uneasy public by an elitist Supreme Court that is unduly swayed by a small and determined faction whose political influence is far in excess of its social support.