Today, Politico reported that Mitt Romney is considering a globe-trotting foreign-policy tour. His foreign-policy advisers have been trashing him in the media for not focusing on their topic enough in the campaign, and the only explanation I can come up with is that he’s doing this to get them off his back. It’s still a dumb idea.

First, voters are overwhelmingly focused on the economy in this election, for understandable reasons. Second, even if he made voters care more about foreign policy, they like President Obama’s, by and large.

I break-down his proposed trip further over at Steve Walt’s blog on For​eign​Pol​i​cy​.com. Whoever suggested (unsuccessfully, apparently) that he stop off in Afghanistan was slapped down. In that case,

it seems the Romney people have realized that Bill Kristol’s suggestion, that he “go and look serious,” is absurd. Going there at all is a huge loser. It’s a zero-sum tradeoff between saying things the public will like and saying things Kristol and his foreign-policy team will like. The public loathes the war, but the Kristol and the Romney foreign-policy staffers like it a lot. So if he went and said anything the public wants to hear — like that he wants America to leave soon — he’d get trashed in the media by his foreign-policy team again. And if he gave a sop to his foreign-policy team, the public would worry he’s Bush redux. So they’re smart to stay away from Kabul.

Read the rest here.

Yesterday, the California Senate passed the TRUST Act. Known by some as the “anti-Arizona immigration law,” it would limit California law enforcement’s cooperation with the federal Secure Communities program. The TRUST Act is positive news for California budgets, residents of the state, and police departments that practice community-policing strategies.

The TRUST Act is an improvement for three main reasons:

1. The TRUST Act would limit immigration detainers to unauthorized immigrants convicted of a serious or violent felony. This is essential to continuing California cities’ successful use of community policing strategies that rely on informant and witness cooperation with police, even if they are unauthorized immigrants. If the possibility of deportation is increased with Secure Communities, fewer unauthorized immigrants and their legal families will go out on a limb to help police solve real crime.

2. The TRUST Act would lower the cost for local governments who object to the high cost of detaining suspected unauthorized immigrants. Food, guards, prisons, beds, and other amenities provided to suspected unauthorized immigrants are too expensive for many jurisdictions.

3. The TRUST Act frees those who haven’t been convicted of violent or serious felonies and would prevent imprisonment of American citizens like James Makowski.

Beyond the TRUST Act, Secure Communities should be discontinued. Secure Communities is a federal immigration enforcement program that links fingerprint records with government immigration and criminal databases. If ICE suspects an arrestee is an unauthorized immigrant, it issues a detainer to hold the arrestee so that ICE is notified when the arrestee is to be released, often delaying the arrestee’s release until ICE is ready—on merely a suspicion that the arrestee is an unauthorized immigrant. ICE then detains the arrestee, verifies he is unauthorized (occasionally they deport American citizens by accident), and deports him. Meanwhile, local police departments hold these suspected unauthorized immigrants past their release dates.

Secure Communities was started in March 2008 by the Bush administration and was piloted in 14 police jurisdictions in October of that year. By now, Secure Communities is active in over 3,000 jurisdictions in the United States and will be nationwide shortly. States and localities originally volunteered to cooperate with ICE in this program, but some states like New York and Illinois want to drop out. The government’s response to their requests was to declare Secure Communities mandatory despite earlier agreements and statements to the contrary.

Makowski, who was naturalized at the age of 1 after his American parents adopted him from India, was held for two months in a maximum security prison in Pontiac, Ill., because his immigration files were not updated after he was naturalized.

“Everybody makes mistakes. I’ve made mine,” said Makowski. “But if the government can detain a U.S. citizen without justification, that’s pretty outrageous. There have to be safeguards in place.”

He is suing the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security for his two-month detention.

ICE officials have previously stated in their Secure Communities agreement with California that the program would only target those “convicted of serious offenses.” Recently obtained government documents show that Secure Communities issues detainers for people who are not suspected of any criminal conduct. Some are detained by Secure Communities because they were unable to identify themselves satisfactorily at drivers’ license checkpoints or because they were arrested for identification purposes. Merely being arrested for non-serious offenses should not subject an arrestee to Secure Communities.

Secure Committees has lost credibility with the public, imposes heavy incarceration costs on states, and the resources expended on it should be used to deport unauthorized immigrants who have been convicted of violent or serious felonies. The TRUST Act would build a wall around the worst parts of Secure Communities in California and help restore confidence between police and immigrants.

As the American and European economies struggle, one of the few bright spots is the ongoing innovation and free-market expansion in technology industries. Thank goodness we have entrepreneurial companies such as Apple and Google generating economic growth and providing exciting opportunities for young people.

But that won’t last if governments have their way. The Washington Post today discusses government efforts to essentially turn the high-tech industry into another moribund regulated industry through antitrust rules:

European regulators last week imposed a $1.1 billion fine on a technology giant that “abused its dominant position.” The company was Microsoft, circa 1998. U.S. officials weren’t much faster. Last year, it officially closed its 14-year-old antitrust case against the software firm. As federal regulators launch fresh investigations into Silicon Valley, their history of drawn-out cases has companies on edge.

In taking on an industry that moves at lightening speed, federal officials risk actions that could appear to be too heavy-handed or embarrassingly outdated, some analysts and antitrust experts say. Indeed, in May, U.S. officials said they would step up their policing of Myspace’s privacy policies even though the company has long fallen out of fashion to behemoth Facebook.

In recent months, antitrust regulators around the world initiated cases involving Silicon Valley’s new guard — Google, Apple and Amazon.

Microsoft’s antitrust battle began in 1998, has stretched over three continents and cost the company more than $2 billion in fines.

These new efforts to impose antitrust rules on technology industries are idiotic. I say idiotic because there is a long history of government failure here. But that history doesn’t seem to make any impression on the proponents of aggressive antitrust action, who seem to be driven by legalistic ideologies, not by common sense economics or practical experience.

In Downsizing the Federal Government, I discussed some prior federal efforts to strangle technology firms with antitrust rules:

The American economy is so dynamic that government “solutions” are usually obsolete by the time they are imposed. Consider the antitrust case against Xerox Corporation in the 1970s. After inventing the photocopier in 1960, Xerox led the industry that it created. It still held a large market share in the early 1970s, which prompted the FTC to charge the company with monopoly. Xerox had a two-year struggle with the FTC that cost millions of dollars and ended in a settlement. As it turned out, government intervention was wholly unneeded as IBM, Eastman-Kodak, Canon, Minolta, and Ricoh surged into the market in the mid-1970s with copiers that were often superior to Xerox’s. Xerox’s market share eroded rapidly under the competition.

Government intervention was also a big waste of time and energy in the infamous IBM antitrust case that lasted from 1969 to 1982. IBM was charged with monopolizing the mainframe computer business. During the long legal battle, the industry evolved rapidly. By 1982, the government finally dropped its case and conceded that it was without merit. The case cost hundreds of millions of dollars in legal expenses, generated 66 million pages of evidence, and diverted IBM’s time and energy from more productive business endeavors.

Despite decades of such failed interventions, antitrust proponents still don’t seem to understand the dynamic nature of markets. A 2003 study by Brookings scholars Robert Crandall and Clifford Winston examined a century of antitrust policy. They found “little empirical evidence that past interventions have provided much direct benefit to consumers or significantly deterred anticompetitive behavior.” Indeed, the authors discuss numerous major cases where the government got it wrong and pursued actions that damaged the economy.

The Brookings analysis makes clear that after a century of trying, antitrust enforcers still have no clear idea when intervening in markets might be a good idea. So let’s stop bludgeoning some of the nation’s leading businesses with impractical rules based on flawed theories. If there ever was a group of One Percenters that we really don’t need, it’s high-paid antitrust lawyers.

This blogpost was co-authored by Trevor Burrus.

The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission owns and operates 23,000 acres of land as a wildlife refuge and recreational preserve; the preserve’s trees are essential to its use for these purposes. Clearwater Dam, a federal flood control project, lies 115 miles upstream. Water is released from the dam in quantities governed by a pre-approved “management plan” that considers agricultural, recreational, and other effects downstream.

Between 1993 and 2000, the federal government released more water than authorized under the plan. AGFC repeatedly objected that these excess releases flooded the preserve during its growing season, which significantly damaged and eventually decimated tree populations. In 2001, the government acknowledged the havoc its flooding had wreaked on AGFC’s land and ceased plan deviations. By then, however, the preserve and its trees were severely damaged, so AGFC sued the government, claiming damages under the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause.

The district court awarded $5.8 million in lost timber and reforestation costs based on the substantiality of the government’s flooding and the foreseeability of the damage it caused. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit reversed that decision, holding that flooding can never be a taking unless that flooding is permanent. It further held that, in determining whether the government’s flooding was permanent or temporary, courts must focus on the character of the policy behind the intrusion rather the effects of the intrusion itself. A taking cannot have occurred here because each deviation from the plan constituted a “temporary” policy, the court concluded, so AGFC had no constitutional remedy.

In December, Cato joined the Pacific Legal Foundation on an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to take the case, which it did. Now Cato again joins the Pacific Legal Foundation, as well as the Atlantic Legal Foundation, on a new brief urging the Court to uphold the Fifth Amendment rights of property owners whose land is destroyed by the federal government.

We argue that the length of time of the government’s physical invasion of property should not be used to determine whether a taking occurred, but rather only for calculating how much damage the taking caused. We further argue that the Federal Circuit’s focus on the “intent” of the government action—whether the flooding resulted from a “permanent or temporary policy”—is likewise irrelevant to whether a taking occurred. Instead, the inquiry should be whether the government caused permanent damage and, if so, how much. The lower court erroneously created a rule—that so long as it might be “temporary,” no government flooding can be remedied under the Fifth Amendment—that runs afoul of a constitutional provision meant to compensate property owners for government intrusions on their land.

The Supreme Court will hear the case of Arkansas Game & Fish Commission v. United States in October or November.

There’s an interesting convergence in the news this morning, with Kimberley Strassel in the Wall Street Journal and an article in the New York Times tackling President Obama’s trampling of the separation of powers. Strassel is dubbing Obama’s an “imperial presidency,” and while the Times offers a straight news piece about No Child Left Behind waivers, it too features a strong whiff of presidential imperialism:

Congress has tried and failed repeatedly to reauthorize the education law over the past five years because Democrats and Republicans cannot agree on an appropriate role for the federal government in education. And so, in the heat of an election year, the Obama administration has maneuvered around Congress, using the waivers to advance its own education agenda.

It’s easy and fun, of course, to cry imperialism when it’s the other guy’s party in power, and as Strassel points out many on the left employed such condemnation—not without cause—against George W. Bush. But that’s precisely the problem: Liberals and conservatives both shunt aside the Constitution when it serves their purposes, but act shocked—shocked!—when the feds or the president employ unconstitutional power to do things they don’t like.

Well guess what, fickle friends of the Constitution: You all righteously shut down the containment unit. You’re all at fault for the demons running rampant.

There’s no better example of this than education, an area over which no federal authority exists yet politicians of both parties have “helped the children” whenever they’ve felt they could get what they wanted. A heavily Democratic Congress and White House gave us the original Elementary and Secondary Education Act—liberals love spending money on schools—and conservatives decried the wasting of taxpayer dough. With NCLB, a largely Republican Congress and White House escalated federal control—conservatives love being seen as tough guys who impose “accountability”—and many on the left became apoplectic. Now President Obama is handing out NCLB waivers contingent on states adopting his favored reforms, and many on the right are rhetorical constitutionalists again.

Here’s the lesson: The next time the guy you despise does something you don’t like, remember when you’ve looked the other way as the Constitution was shoved in a drawer, or torn up, in pursuit of what you wanted. Remember, and heap blame on yourself, because it is your fault.

For more, click here:

Remember back in 2009, when President Obama and his team told us that we needed to spend $800 billion on a so-called stimulus package?

The crowd in Washington was quite confident that Keynesian spending was going to save the day, even though similar efforts had failed for Hoover and Roosevelt in the 1930s, for Japan in the 1990s, and for Bush in 2008.

Nonetheless, we were assured that the stimulus was needed to keep unemployment from rising above 8 percent.

Well, that claim has turned out to be hollow. Not that we needed additional evidence, but the new numbers from the Labor Department re-confirm that the White House prediction was wildly inaccurate. The 8.2 percent unemployment rate is 2.5 percentage points above the administration’s prediction.

Defenders of the Obama administration sometimes respond by saying that the downturn was more serious than anyone predicted. That’s a legitimate point, so I don’t put too much blame on the White House for the initial spike in joblessness.

But I do blame them for the fact that the labor market has remained weak for such a long time. The chart below, which I generated this morning using the Minneapolis Fed’s interactive website, shows employment data for all the post-World War II recessions. The current business cycle is the red line. As you can see, some recessions were deeper in the beginning and some were milder. But the one thing that is unambiguous is that we’ve never had a jobs recovery as anemic as the one we’re experiencing now.

Job creation has been extraordinarily weak. Indeed, the current 8.2 percent unemployment rate understates the bad news because it doesn’t capture all the people who have given up and dropped out of the labor force.

By the way, I don’t think the so-called stimulus is the main cause of today’s poor employment data. Rather, the vast majority of that money was simply wasted.

Today’s weak job market is affected by factors such as the threat of higher taxes in 2013 (when the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts are scheduled to expire), the costly impact of Obamacare, and the harsh regulatory environment. This cartoon shows, in an amusing fashion, the effect these policies have on entrepreneurs and investors.

Postscript: Click on this link if you want to compare Obamanomics and Reaganomics. The difference is astounding.

Post-postscript: The president will probably continue to blame “headwinds” for the dismal job numbers, so this cartoon is definitely worth sharing.

Post-post-postscript: Since I’m sharing cartoons, I can’t resist recycling this classic about Keynesian stimulus.

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman Darrell Issa (R‑CA) released a report today on failed mortgage company Countrywide’s use of a VIP loan program to curry favor with Beltway decision-makers. Members of Congress, congressional staffers, and cabinet officials received preferential treatment – including rate discounts and fee waivers – from Countrywide.

Countrywide was a major beneficiary of the federal government’s overzealous subsidization of housing, which contributed to the housing bubble and bust that fueled the recent economic downturn. As I explained in a Cato essay on HUD scandals, Countrywide had a close relationship with Fannie Mae, the government-sponsored mortgage giant that eventually collapsed and, along with Freddie Mac, has cost taxpayers over $180 billion and counting:

In 1999, Countrywide, which had become the nation’s largest residential housing lender, reached an exclusive agreement to sell Fannie Mae billions of dollars in mortgages in exchange for lower “guarantee” fees that Fannie charged originators when it bought their loans. The success, and then failure, of both entities became intertwined as Fannie purchased large amounts of subprime loans and securities, which allowed subprime lenders like Countrywide to grow their businesses. When the subprime market collapsed in 2007, Countrywide collapsed as well. It was bought at a fire sale price by the Bank of America, while a broken Fannie Mae was taken over by the federal government.

Fannie Mae executives received numerous VIP loans from Countrywide. According to Issa’s report, Countrywide “buttressed” Fannie’s massive lobbying efforts to stop Congress from passing legislation that would rein in the GSEs:

Countrywide gave VIP loans to congressional staff who played a role in policy discussions that affected Countrywide. Staff with connections to the committees of jurisdiction for mortgage industry issues in the House and Senate received VIP loans from Countrywide. Between 2000 and 2005, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac committed their vast lobbying resources to defeating GSE reform legislation considered by the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs and House Committee on Financial Services. Countrywide buttressed the efforts of Fannie’s lobbyists by connecting with key staffers through the VIP program. Documents obtained by the Committee show a staffer in the office of Senator Robert Bennett received several VIP loans. Along with Christopher Dodd, Bennett was a member of the Senate Banking Committee, the committee of jurisdiction for the Senate’s consideration of legislation affecting the GSEs and the mortgage industry. As early as 1998, House Financial Services Committee staff were receiving VIP loans from Countrywide.

Regardless of whether any of this was technically illegal, it’s another example of the privileged life enjoyed by the Beltway class. Both Republicans and Democrats benefited from the Countrywide favor factory, which is also another example of how when one clears away the fog of partisan politics, they will see that we taxpaying peons are merely pawns in a never-ending struggle for control over our lives.