Alex Nowrasteh and Ryan Young of the Competitive Enterprise Institute make the case for immigration reform in an especially appealing way in a fresh op-ed this week in the Detroit News.

In a commentary article titled, “Fix immigration rules to crush black market,” they dissect a well-meaning but flawed Obama administration effort to fix the dysfunctional H‑2A visa program for temporary farm workers. Instead of fine tuning an unworkable law, Nowrasteh and Young advocate liberalization:

That means making H‑2A visas inexpensive, easy to obtain, and keeping the related paperwork and regulations to a minimum. That means no minimum wage hike. No costly background check requirements. People rarely break laws that are reasonable and easy to obey.

When legal channels cost too much in time and money, people will turn to illegal channels every time. That’s how the world works. Getting rid of immigration’s black market begins with admitting that fact.

Hear, hear.

That’s the finding by Federal Judge Vaughn Walker in a ruling made late yesterday. As the news reports note, Obama’s lawyers came into court to defend Bush’s policy–so that’s two administrations acting contrary to law.

The ruling itself can be found here (H/T to the How Appealing blog). For related Cato work, go here and here.

When the president’s health care reform was causing public angst, the administration announced a crackdown on fraud and abuse in government health programs. Now that the public is getting agitated over the president’s massive deficits, the administration says that it is going to crack down on improper payments made by all government programs, which totaled $100 billion in 2009 according to government estimates.

The administration is selling the effort as being taxpayer-friendly. But if the administration were to magically make all improper payments disappear, what would it mean for taxpayers? Probably not much unfortunately. Under the administration’s latest budget proposal, the federal government will consume a quarter of the nation’s output for years to come. Would Congress or the president pass on any savings from the fraud crackdown to taxpayers? I haven’t heard of any such plans. Any savings would apparently just go to expanding programs.

The best way to reduce improper payments is to reduce the overall size of government. An article in Gov​Ex​ec​.com points out that a chief reason why the price tag for improper payments is rising is because the government keeps getting bigger:

Payment errors have increased steadily since 2004, Wanda Rogers, deputy commissioner of the Treasury Department’s Financial Management Service, told attendees at a federal financial management conference in Washington on Tuesday…Rogers attributed the rise in errors to several factors, including increases in both the dollar value of outlays as well as the number of federal programs. In addition, more stringent reporting requirements have led agencies to identify erroneous payments more accurately, she said.

In reviewing the OMB’s new guidelines for how federal agencies are supposed to calculate and report improper payments, a couple of issues caught my attention.

On the role of the inspectors general, the guidelines state:

1. Nothing in this Guidance should be construed to impair the authority of an Inspector General under the Inspector General Act of 1978 or any other law. However, because the recovery audit program required by this Guidance is an integral part of the agency’s internal control over contract payments, and therefore a management function, independence considerations would normally preclude the Inspector General and other agency external auditors from carrying out management’s recovery audit program.

2. Agencies’ Inspectors General and other external agency auditors are encouraged to assess the effectiveness of agencies’ recovery audit programs as part of their internal control work on existing audits (e.g., the annual financial statement audit, or as a separate audit).

Perhaps the IGs wouldn’t have the resources to perform this function, but the language appears to be too constricting. “Independence considerations” can be a problem when the fox is guarding the henhouse as the temptation exists for program managers to massage ugly data. The IGs and the Government Accountability Office should be more involved.

When I was a budget official at the state of Indiana, I noticed that the internal audit controls in state agencies were compromised by a lack of independence. Certain agency heads weren’t fond of having problems brought to their attention, let alone the attention of our office or the public.

An example of this recently occurred in Pennsylvania where the state Department of Welfare reported an improper payment rate for state’s Medicaid program of 4 percent. However, when Pennsylvania’s auditor general’s office audited the program, it found an improper payment rate that was more than three times higher.

The issue of the quality of state oversight leads to another problem: federal programs that are managed by state and local government. The guidelines simply state:

Agencies that have Federally-funded, State-administered programs, especially any that are deemed high-priority, should work at the Federal, State, and local levels to reduce improper payments and to implement the requirements of the Executive Order.

Having researched many federal programs that are administered by the states, a common theme is that state oversight is inconsistent and usually lacking. Some states independently audit their programs to varying degrees, while others rely solely on internal controls, as in the case of Indiana. Moreover, federal oversight of state management appears to be more focused on bureaucratic compliance than conducting any serious reviews.

See this essay for more on fraud and abuse in government programs.

No, that’s not the name of a new TV series. We should be so lucky.

It’s actually a good description of the government’s approach to tobacco.

Instead of letting adults make up their own minds about costs and benefits of risky choices (which includes most things in life, such as crossing a street and eating a cheeseburger), nanny-state officials have decided to investigate menthol-flavored cigarettes. And since the Food and Drug Administration has been given authority over the tobacco industry and since the FDA’s supposed purpose is to ensure drugs are “safe and effective,” that almost certainly means this latest campaign will lead to either further restrictions on free speech or outright bans.

Here’s a blurb from the Wall Street Journal:

Congress last year added the tobacco industry to the FDA’s regulatory mix and today a panel of health experts making up the agency’s new Tobacco Products Scientific Advisory Committee is kicking off a two-day meeting. First on the agenda: how menthol flavoring in cigarettes affects smokers’ habits. Small wonder that menthol is getting early attention, says the New York Times, which notes menthol butts account for almost a third of the $70 billion U.S. cigarette market.

After more meetings, the advisory panel will send recommendations to the FDA, which could eventually decide to ban menthol products or take steps to curtail their marketing.

One can only wonder how far down the slope we will slide. There already are attacks against fatty foods and sugary soft drinks. Both provide pleasure to many people, but that no longer means much in Washington. Will regulators, either at the FDA or elsewhere, eventually decide that anything linked to obesity must be regulated and/​or taxed?

And now that government is going to pick up the tab for an even larger share of health costs, how long before the politicians use obesity-related costs as a major justification for further efforts to control our private lives? Maybe some day we will have a Federal Health Police to enforce daily exercise mandates? I better stop now before I give them any ideas.

Our friends at the Institute for Justice just released a comprehensive report on the abuses that go on under the legal procedure known as “civil asset forfeiture.” The report is called Policing for Profit (pdf). Here is a short video clip that IJ put together:

Senior IJ attorney Scott Bullock will be speaking on this subject here at the Cato Institute on April 28. Details on that event are forthcoming.

For related Cato work on forfeiture, go here and here.

Now that the Obama health plan is law, more than a dozen states are asserting that Congress has exceeded its Commerce Clause power in imposing a mandate on individuals to purchase health insurance from private companies. No doubt, individual citizens will challenge the individual mandate on their own behalf.

States are also asserting that the threat to withhold all Medicaid payments if the states do not set up health insurance exchanges and enact other regulations amounts to coercion and unconstitutional commandeering of states by the federal government.

No one who opposes ObamaCare should put their faith in the Supreme Court to strike down an act of Congress, no matter how unprecedented and unconstitutional it may be. Nor should those who support ObamaCare be confident that the Supreme Court will uphold these provisions.

Legal challenges cannot take the place of political action. The Court hates to strike down popular legislation, but if the legislation is unpopular, one or both houses of Congress have changed parties and only a filibuster or presidential veto is preventing repeal, then the Court may feel more comfortable upholding the Constitution.

Brian Walsh of The Heritage Foundation and Paul Rosenzweig have a new book out, One Nation Under Arrest: How Crazy Laws, Rogue Prosecutors, and Activist Judges Threaten Your Liberty.

For an example of how our federal criminal laws have morphed into a leviathan that threatens the liberty of average citizens, take the case of inventor and entrepreneur Krister Evertson:

In May 2004, FBI agents driving a black Suburban and wearing SWAT gear ran Evertson off the road near his mother’s home in Wasilla, Alaska. When Evertson was face down on the pavement with automatic weapons trained on him, an FBI agent told him he was being arrested because he hadn’t put a federally mandated sticker on a UPS package.

A jury in federal court in Alaska acquitted Evertson, but the feds weren’t finished. They reached into their bag of over 4,500 federal crimes and found another ridiculous crime they could use to prosecute him: supposedly “abandoning” hazardous waste (actually storing, in appropriate containers, valuable materials he was using for the clean-fuel technology he was developing). A second jury convicted him, and he spent 21 months in an Oregon federal prison.

Draconian enforcement of regulatory offenses is just the tip of the iceberg. For additional information on the creep of federal criminal law, check out In the Name of Justice: Leading Experts Reexamine the Classic Article “The Aims of the Criminal Law” by Tim Lynch, Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent by Harvey Silverglate, and Go Directly to Jail: The Criminalization of Almost Everything by Gene Healy.