Cato senior fellow Tom Palmer and friends Don Boudreaux and June Arunga debate free trade with the legendary Lou Dobbs around John Stossel’s anchor desk on tonight’s edition of “Stossel.” 8:00 p.m. and midnight EDT on the Fox Business Network.

Stossel’s weekly column also interviews Tom Palmer.

Tonight on Stossel: Taking on Lou Dobbs is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Yes, you read that right. The story is more complicated than a short headline can covey, but that is the gist of an article of mine in the just-out December issue of Commentary magazine. [Subscription needed.]

The past 15 years have witnessed two undeniable trends: dramatically rising levels of immigration, both low-skilled and high-skilled, and an equally dramatic plunge in crime rates nationally. I don’t argue that increased immigration in the past 15 years is the primary cause of falling crime rates, but I do argue that the evidence punches a gaping hole in the Lou-Dobbs contention that immigrants have clogged our prisons and unleashed a new wave of crime.

In the Commentary article, and in an earlier Cato Free Trade Bulletin, I cite Census data that show that incarceration rates for immigrants are significantly lower than for native-born Americans. The contrast is especially sharp between immigrants without a high-school diploma and their native-born counterparts. Along with their lower propensity to commit crimes, immigrants are also more likely to be employed than similarly educated Americans.

Or as the subhead of the magazine article nicely puts it, “Today’s ‘underclass’ of newcomers seeks a day’s work, not a drug deal.”

Higher Immigration, Lower Crime is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• In the past eight months, the unemployment rate has jumped from 7.2 percent to 10.2 percent. Here’s why.

• Three trillion reasons to hope the Senate is not as fiscally reckless as their counterparts in the House on health care reform.

• Obama a federalist? Not quite: “Not yet a year into his administration, Obama’s record on 10th Amendment issues is already clear: He’ll let the states have their way when their policies please blue team sensibilities and he’ll call in the feds when they don’t.” More here.

• It’s time to get immigration reform right: “Republican leaders need to liberate themselves from the Lou Dobbs minority within their own ranks that will oppose any legalization. Democratic leaders need to face down their labor-union constituency that opposes any workable temporary-visa program. Working together, President Obama and a bipartisan majority in Congress can seize the current opportunity to reform the immigration system and finally fix the problem of illegal immigration.”

• Podcast: “Preventing the Next Fort Hood Shooting“

Tuesday Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In his CNN swan song last night, Lou Dobbs told his loyal if shrinking audience that important national issues

are now defined in the public arena by partisanship and ideology rather than by rigorous empirical thought and forthright analysis and discussion. I will be working diligently to change that as best I can.

I would argue that his very act of resigning from his prime-time perch is probably the best contribution he’s made yet to advancing “rigorous empirical thought.”

Since he launched his program “Lou Dobbs Tonight” in 2003, the CNN anchor has been engaged in one long rant against immigration, free trade, and other populist bugaboos. His approach was anything but rigorous and empirical.

In a review of his 2004 book, Exporting America, I critiqued his flabby reasoning and questionable facts. (My new Cato book, Mad about Trade, is a painless, one-shot antidote to everything Dobbs has said about free trade, manufacturing, and the middle class.) The New York Times, “60 Minutes” and other mainstream news outlets have exposed such outrageous whoppers from Dobbs as his claim that immigrants have caused an explosion of leprosy cases and crime.

Dobbs was vague about his plans for the future last night, but there is some speculation that he will run for office, perhaps for president in 2012. I hope he does. It would be an interesting test of just how popular his sentiments really are among Main Street Americans.

Good Night, Lou Dobbs is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

This is a reminder, citizen: Only cranks worry about vastly increased governmental power to gather transactional data about Americans’ online behavior. Why, just last week, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) informed us that there has not been any “demonstrated or recent abuse” of such authority by means of National Security Letters, which permit the FBI to obtain many telecommunications records without court order. I mean, the last Inspector General report finding widespread and systemic abuse of those came out, like, over a year ago! And as defenders of expanded NSL powers often remind us, similar records can often be obtained by grand jury subpoena.

Subpoenas like, for instance, the one issued last year seeking the complete traffic logs of the left-wing site Indymedia for a particular day. According to tech journo Declan McCullah:

It instructed [System administrator Kristina] Clair to “include IP addresses, times, and any other identifying information,” including e-mail addresses, physical addresses, registered accounts, and Indymedia readers’ Social Security Numbers, bank account numbers, credit card numbers, and so on.

The sweeping request came with a gag order prohibiting Clair from talking about it. (As a constitutional matter, courts have found that recipients of such orders must at least be allowed to discuss them with attorneys in order to seek advise about their legality, but the subpoena contained no notice of that fact.) Justice Department officials tell McCullagh that the request was never reviewed directly by the Attorney General, as is normally required when information is sought from a press organization. Clair did tell attorneys at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and  when they wrote to U.S. Attorney Timothy Morrison questioning the propriety of the request, it was promptly withdrawn. EFF’s Kevin Bankston explains the legal problems with the subpoena at length.

Perhaps ironically, the targeting of Indymedia, which is about as far left as news sites get, may finally hep the populist right to the perils of the burgeoning surveillance state. It seems to have piqued Glenn Beck’s interest, and McCullagh went on Lou Dobbs’ show to talk about the story. Thus far, the approved conservative position appears to have been that Barack Obama is some kind of ruthless Stalinist with a secret plan to turn the United States into a massive gulag—but under no circumstances should there be any additional checks on his administration’s domestic spying powers.  This always struck me as both incoherent and a tragic waste of paranoia. Now that we’ve had a rather public reminder that such powers can be used to compile databases of people with politically unorthodox browsing habits, perhaps Beck—who seems to be something of an amateur historian—will take some time to delve into the story of COINTELPRO and other related projects our intelligence community busied itself with before we established an architecture of surveillance oversight in the late ’70s.

You know, the one we’ve spent the past eight years dismantling.

Who Reads the Readers? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I appeared on the CNN program Lou Dobbs Tonight last Thursday (Oct. 22) to discuss the medical marijuana issue and the drug war in general.  There were two other guests: Peter Moskos from John Jay College and the organization Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) and Barry McCaffrey, retired General of the U.S. Army and former “Drug Czar” under President Bill Clinton.

I was really astonished by the doubletalk coming from McCaffrey.  Watch the clip below and then I’ll explain two of the worst examples so you can come to your own conclusions about this guy.

Doubletalk: Example One:

Tim Lynch: “Some states have changed their marijuana laws to allow patients who are suffering from cancer and AIDS–people who want to use marijuana for medical reasons–they’re exempt from the law. But there’s a clash between the laws of the state governments and the federal government. The federal government has come in and said, ‘We’re going to threaten people with federal prosecution, bring them into federal court.’ And what the [new memo from the Obama Justice Department] does this week is change federal policy. Basically, Attorney General Eric Holder is saying, ‘Look, for people, genuine patients–people suffering from cancer, people suffering from AIDS–these people are now off limits to federal prosecutors.’ It’s a very small step in the direction of reform.”

Now comes Barry McCaffrey: “There is zero truth to the fact that the Drug Enforcement Administration or any other federal law enforcement ever threatened care-givers or individual patients. That’s fantasy!”

Zero truth? Fantasy?  This report from USA Today tells the story of several patients who were harassed and threatened by federal agents. Excerpt:  ”In August 2002, federal agents seized six plants from [Diane] Monson’s home and destroyed them.”

This report from the San Francisco Chronicle tells the story of Bryan Epis and Ed Rosenthal.  Both men, in separate incidents, were raided, arrested, and prosecuted by federal officials.  The feds called them “drug dealers.”  When the cases came to trial, both men were eager to inform their juries about the actual circumstances surrounding their cases–but they were not allowed to convey those circumstances to jurors.  Federal prosecutors insisted that information concerning the medical aspect of marijuana was “irrelevant.”   Both men were convicted and jailed.

This report from the New York Times tells readers about the death of Peter McWilliams.  The feds said he was a “drug dealer.”  McWilliams also wanted to tell his story to a jury, but pled guilty when the judge told him he would not be allowed to inform the jury of his medical condition.  Excerpt:  “At his death, Mr. McWilliams was waiting to be sentenced in federal court after being convicted of having conspired to possess, manufacture and sell marijuana…. They pleaded guilty to the charge last year after United States District Judge George H. King ruled that they could not use California’s medical marijuana initiative, Proposition 215, as a defense, or even tell the jury of the initiative’s existence and their own medical conditions.”  The late William F. Buckley wrote about McWilliams’ case here.

Imagine what Diane Monson, Bryan Epis, Ed Rosenthal, and Peter McWilliams (and others) would have thought had they seen a former top official claim that federal officials never threatened patients or caregivers?!

Doubletalk: Example Two:

Tim Lynch: “After California changed its laws to allow the medical use of marijuana, [General Barry McCaffrey] was the Drug Czar at the time and he came in taking a very hard line. The Clinton administration’s position was that they were going to threaten doctors simply for discussing the pros and cons of using marijuana with their patients. That policy was fought over in the courts and [the Clinton/McCaffrey] policy was later declared illegal and unconstitutional for violating the free speech of doctors and for interfering with the doctor-patient relationship. This was the ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in a case called Conant – “C-O-N-A-N-T.”

Lou Dobbs: “The ruling stood in the Ninth Circuit?”

Tim Lynch: “Yes, it did.”

Now comes Barry McCaffrey: “That’s all nonsense!”

Nonsense?  Really?

Go here to read the New York Times story about McCaffrey’s hard-line policy.

The Conant ruling can be found here.  The name of the case was initially Conant v. McCaffrey, but as the months passed and the case worked its way up to the appeals court, the case was renamed Conant v. Walters because Bush entered the White House and he appointed his own drug czar, John Walters, who maintained the hard line policy initiated by Clinton and McCaffrey.

I should also mention that Conant was not an obscure case that McCaffrey could have somehow ”missed.”  Here’s a snippet from another New York Times report:  “The Supreme Court, in a silent rebuff on Tuesday to federal policy on medical marijuana, let stand an appeals court ruling that doctors may not be investigated, threatened or punished by federal regulators for recommending marijuana as a medical treatment for their patients.”  The point here is that the case was covered by major media as it unfolded.

When our television segment concluded, Lou Dobbs asked me some follow-up questions and asked me to supply additional info to one of his producers, which I was happy to do.

Whatever one’s view happens to be on drug policy, the historical record is there for any fair-minded person to see — and yet McCaffrey looked right into the camera and denied  past actions by himself and other federal agents.  And he didn’t say, “I think that’s wrong” or “I don’t remember it that way.”  He baldly asserted that my recounting of the facts was “nonsense.”   Now I suppose some will say that falsehoods are spoken on TV fairly often–maybe, I’m not sure–but it is distressing that this character held the posts that he did and that he continues to instruct cadets at West Point!

My fellow panelist, Peter Moskos, has a related blog post here and he had a good piece published in the Washington Post just yesterday.  For more Cato scholarship on drug policy, go here.

Fact-checking Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Federal Diary column in the Washington Post is a curious piece of newspaper real estate. Most newspaper columns are aimed at the broad general public, but this column is aimed directly at the few hundred thousand government workers in the DC region. The result is that it takes a very government- and union-centric view of the world. The fact that the federal civilian workforce costs taxpayers an enormous $300 billion or so every year is beside the point for the column.

In a briefing with reporters yesterday, the head of the Office of Personnel Management complained about a Lou Dobbs television bit that featured this data that I assembled from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The Federal Diary columnist called me yesterday about the data, and I explained to him the shortcomings of the OPM claims that federal workers are underpaid.

Unfortunately, the Federal Diary today simply parrots the OPM’s claims, calling the Dobbs/Edwards/BEA data “misleading.” Yet this data clearly shows that federal compensation has taken off like a rocket this decade.

Today’s column, like many of the Federal Diary columns, is about how to improve the pay, benefits, and working conditions of federal workers. What about the taxpayers who foot the bill? To provide some balance, the Post ought to at least have a side-by-side column entitled “Federal Taxpayers’ Diary.”

Taxpayers and the Federal Diary is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Try as they might, supporters of big government spending cannot make federal programs work very well. The Department of Energy, for example, has been plagued by mismanagement, cost overruns, and scandals for decades.

Today, the Washington Post reports on the poor performance of DoE’s environmental clean-up programs. As I reviewed in the linked essay, these enormously costly programs have been plagued by mismanagement for at least 25 years. Last week, Lou Dobbs lambasted DOE’s National Ignition Facility in California for its huge cost overruns (Hat Tip: Harrison Moar).

I summarize these costly projects and other DoE boondoggles here. With bipartisan support for increases to energy subsidies, we can expect a raft of bipartisan boondoggles developing over coming months and years.

Energy Mismanagment is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The latest U.S. trade numbers were released this morning, and the news reports so far have predictably focused on the fact that the U.S. trade deficit in March expanded modestly compared to February.

The real story behind the numbers, however, is that U.S. imports and exports continue to decline. Compared to the month before, U.S. exports of goods fell another $3.0 billion, while imports fell by $1.6 billion.

If we go back a full year, the drop in trade is staggering. Between March of 2008 and March of 2009, U.S. exports of goods and services fell by 17 percent, and imports fell an even steeper 27 percent. As a result, the goods and services deficit is less than half of what it was a year ago.

Critics of trade such as CNN’s Lou Dobbs are always harping that if we could only reduce our dependence on imports, and along with it the trade deficit, Americans would enjoy higher wages and more plentiful jobs.

Well, we’ve managed in the past year to reduce imports by more than a quarter and cut the trade deficit by more than half. Are we feeling any better?

Good News! Recession Cuts Trade Deficit in Half! is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog