People often believe that price gouging is so obviously immoral that making it illegal is the equivalent of criminalizing theft. In their minds, sellers who drastically hike their prices after a supply or demand shock are simply cruel capitalists taking advantage of poor consumers, who are practically forced to hand over their money.

The student of economics, of course, would sooner laud this practice than condemn it. After all, price changes are an important part of the market process because they help us economize scarce resources.

Inflation—defined herein as a widespread increase in the prices of widely purchased consumer goods—has gotten worse since 

Late last year, US secretary of state Anthony Blinken declared that “One country does not have the right to exert a sphere of influence. That notion should be relegated to the dustbin of history.”

His words were directed at Russia after Moscow increasingly made it clear that it considers Ukraine to be part of Russia’s “near abroad” and thus part of Russia’s sphere of influence.

Russian president Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in the last week of February 2022 was the culmination of decades of transnational statist expansion.

The inflation rates reported by governments are generally, at the very least, a little lower than they actually are. And the US government is not an exception. It makes the CPI (Consumer Price Index) artificially lower (by making changes in the methodology) and benefits from it in several ways (increasing its revenues while the voters don’t realize they are being lied to and losing their purchasing power).

The decision of Western countries to punish Russia for invading Ukraine by lacing her with a wave of sanctions suggests that global leaders are failing to learn from history. Sanctions are an ineffective tool to curb the ambitions of rogue actors and they are unlikely to make autocrats think twice.  Non-democratic regimes are already blacklisted by the liberal political order so using sanctions to further isolate them often succeeds at emboldening autocrats to drum up political support.

Some healthcare providers are refusing to treat unvaccinated Covid-19 patients. But is there really an argument for doing so? The claim is that unvaccinated patients are imposing an undue burden on the health system. However, the legitimacy of this claim fails to justify withholding treatment for unvaccinated patients. If the argument is that the negligence of unvaccinated people is straining the health system, then a similar logic must be applied to other scenarios, and failing to do so delegitimates the case for discriminating against the unvaccinated.