At politico.com.

Human Rights Watch, the group best known for documenting governmental abuse and war crimes, plans to release a report on Wednesday showing that child and forced labor is widespread on farms that supply a cigarette factory owned by Philip Morris International in Kazakhstan, in Central Asia.

Assuming the child labor is not coerced, these children are better off than if public or government pressure forces Philip Morris to stop hiring them. Under that scenario, most of these children would have zero income rather than a low income. It might “feel good” to oppose child labor, but the alternative for these children is not attending some nice school or relying on parental income; the alternative is an even lower standard of living if they cannot work.

The Obama administration has announced a plan to reduce the negative impact of AIDS:

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama says the United States is committed to stopping the scourge of HIV/AIDS and helping those afflicted lead a better life.

Said the president: “The question is not whether we know what to do but whether we will do it.”

Obama spoke as his administration released a new national strategy to combat the disease. It sets a goal of reducing new infections by 25 percent over the next five years.

The key question is how the administration plans to reduce the number of new infections.

One method is to expand access to clean needles and/or moderate-priced heroin and other injected drugs. Sharing dirty needles is a major source of HIV transmission in the United States, and this results from a combination of prohibition-induced restrictions on clean syringes and prohibition-induced high prices, which incentivize injection because this produces a big bang for the buck.

Providing better access to clean needles just means repealing laws that require a prescription to buy a syringe.

Providing better access to opiates need not consist of outright legalization (although that would be fine with me). Instead, it could mean expanding methadone clinics or allowing doctors to treat addicts via maintenance, i.e., by providing them with medical supplies of opiates.

At one level, this sounds idiotic: it is “treating” addiction by supporting addiction.

But past experience suggests it “works” in the following sense: addicts who get access to reliable, moderatedpriced supplies of opiates consistently reduce their criminal activities, increase their legitimate income, and experience better health outcomes. That is, much of the negative of being an addict arises from being addicted to a goood that is difficult to obtain.

Government stimulus spending is a contentious issue right now in Washington. But the $7.2 billion in the last stimulus package for extending high-speed Internet access is just beginning to be spent, and the beneficiaries could not be happier.

Of course the beneficiaries are happy; they are getting a gift from the rest of the country. But why is such a gift appropriate? The fact that private internet providers have not extended their networks to these areas means the benefits – the amount consumers would pay for the service – do not exceed the costs.

How, then, does it stimulate the economy for the government to waste resources?

ST. LOUIS — Seated at a hookah lounge in the Tower Grove district, Albert Kuo trained his lighter above a marbleized glass pipe stuffed with synthetic marijuana. Inhaling deeply, Mr. Kuo, an art student at an area college, singed the pipe’s leafy contents, emitting a musky cloud of smoke into the afternoon light.

Mr. Kuo, 25, had gathered here with a small cohort of friends for what could be the last time they legally get high in Missouri on a substance known popularly as K2, a blend of herbs treated with synthetic marijuana.

Read the rest here. One lesson seems to be that technology allows the private sector to circumvent government limits on private behavior.

is that we expend taxpayer resources on this stuff:

A federal probe into doping in professional cycling is proceeding quickly, and investigators are currently in discussions with several riders and their attorneys to secure their cooperation after the Tour de France ends later this month.

Why not just let cycling police itself?

Apparently the Obama administration has changed its approach to reducing employment of illegal immigrants:

BREWSTER, Wash. — The Obama administration has replaced immigration raids at factories and farms with a quieter enforcement strategy: sending federal agents to scour companies’ records for illegal immigrant workers.

While the sweeps of the past commonly led to the deportation of such workers, the “silent raids,” as employers call the audits, usually result in the workers being fired, but in many cases they are not deported.

So which strategy makes more sense? In my view, neither.

I oppose any attempt to interfere in employer decisions about whom they employ. This means I oppose anti-discimination laws like Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, child labor laws, minimum wage laws, and any laws that bar hiring of illegals. Business should be treated as private, and employers should be able to employ whomever they please without interference.

In the case of immigration policy, moreover, I doubt that employer sanctions will reduce immigration to a significant degree unless the enforcement is draconian that it imposes crippling costs on businesses. That would produce some combination of reduced employment for everyone and a much larger underground sector.

The incontrovertible reality is that illegal immigration will occur in substantial amounts so long as wage differences between the U.S. and Latin America remain large. We can either accept that fact, or legalize more immigration.

Christopher Edley, currently dean of UC Berkeley’s law school and formerly an important advisor to Bill Clinton, is concerned that states cannot run their own macroeconomic policies.  So he proposes the following:

The best booster shot for this recovery and the next would be to allow states to borrow from the Treasury during recessions. We did this for Wall Street and Detroit, fending off disaster. It’s even more important for states.

The potential for this plan to unleash catastrophic increases in state debt, analogously to what happened with Greece once it joined the Euro zone, should be obvious.

At forbes.com.

On WBUR’s Here and Now Show, with Robin Young. Click here.