Last Sunday, on the TV newsmagazine 60 Minutes, President Donald Trump told his interviewer that he’d like to work with the Democrats to pass legislation giving illegal aliens a path to legal status in the United States. In other words, Trump is now saying he favors making a deal to enact some sort of amnesty for illegal aliens.

There is much commentary purporting to explain the recent French riots. (I write this article on October 24, 2026). But so far I have seen no explanation that attempts to lay at least part of the blame to faulty economic theory. I will attempt to do that here.

Editor’s note: This article first appeared on LewRockwell.com on July 12, 2005. 

If you haven’t seen this, it is really an outrage.

Digital surveillance promises to make institutions more secure by enabling them to see more. Automated license-plate readers, facial recognition systems, and interconnected databases allow authorities to identify patterns and retrieve information at speeds once considered impossible. Yet greater capacity to detect and classify does not necessarily improve the ability to determine what happened. An institution may acquire more information without gaining the ability to interpret it accurately.

The recent reaction in the gold market to the September US inflation data offers a textbook illustration of how short-term speculative noise can obscure and distort longer-term realities. After the CPI print showed a 0.6 percent month-on-month rise and 3.7 percent year-on-year, followed by an even hotter PPI of 1.3 percent monthly and 6.3 percent annually, spot gold sold off sharply. Prices briefly tested levels near $4,070–$4,100 before recovering most of the ground.

One major reason for studying history is to learn lessons that shed light on contemporary problems and avoid repeating the same mistakes. As the historian Clyde Wilson has reminded us, “history is not a mathematical calculation or scientific experiment but a vast drama of which there is always more to be learned.”