The false notion that the US has eliminated virtually all of its barriers to foreign imports has been repeated more and more in recent years. The claim is made both by advocates for free trade and by its critics. For instance, Patrick Buchanan has claimed that only American elites “are beneficiaries to free trade,” implying that the US either has free trade or something close to it.

In The Poverty of Historicism (1957), the great philosopher of science Karl Popper claims, “I have shown that, for strictly logical reasons, it is impossible for us to predict the future course of human history.” By showing this, Popper thought he had fatally wounded Marxism and other varieties of what he calls “historicism.” As Popper uses the term, it refers to the view that scientific laws allow us to predict the future. Marxists believe that the laws of economics establish that capitalism will face crises that will grow in severity.

Sometimes terrible things happen without any human malfeasance, and the novel Wuhan coronavirus may in fact be one of those things. It is entirely plausible the virus emerged from “wet markets“ in the Hubei Province of China rather than as a fumbled (or worse, intentionally released) bioweapon cooked up by the Xi Jinping government. 

All too often, discussion over trade deals focuses almost solely on tariffs.

It’s true that tariffs—i.e., taxes—are always a significant barrier to free exchange at all levels, but there are also plenty of ways to block or lessen trade that are not primarily tariff-based. Recent conflicts over the pending negotiations between the UK and the EU are a reminder of this.

Before coronavirus and impeachment, the Sino-American trade war stubbornly remained on the mainstream news circuit while largely governing the direction of financial markets. With each rumor of concession or tweet of condemnation, stocks gyrated and bonds jittered. Each round of negotiation was matched by salvos of tariffs, export controls, lawsuits, complaints, declarations, and threats. At its peak, the US imposed tariffs on $550 billion of Chinese imports while China retaliated with tariffs on $185 billion of U.S.

In my previous article, I looked at how government regulations have created an an uneven playing field that favors natural gas and oil over coal. This time, we’ll look at how regulators favor some types of “renewable” energy over others while biasing the system against nuclear energy.

US policymakers are spurning free competitive markets for government-created energy monopolies and oligopolies, and the picking of winners and losers among fuel types. The preference for monopolies that block innovation, along with favoritism for oil and natural gas, as well as wind and solar, increases the risks of economic and environmental crises, and even war.

One thing we’ve learned from the Trump presidency is that the “deep state” is not just some crazy conspiracy theory. For the past three years we’ve seen that deep state launch plot after plot to overturn the election.

It all started with former CIA director John Brennan’s phony “Intelligence Assessment” of Russian involvement in the 2016 election. It was claimed that all seventeen US intelligence agencies agreed that Putin put Trump in office, but we found out later that the report was cooked up by a handful of Brennan’s handpicked agents.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) is in a state of crisis. Despite grandiose dreams of a global trade organization that would enforce global bureaucrats’ broad vision for multilateral trade agreements, the world looks more and more like it neither wants nor needs an organization like the WTO.

CNBC reports this week that the WTO is in “a reform-or-die moment,” as both the US and Chinese governments appear uninterested in taking orders from the WTO.

[This article is part of the Understanding Money Mechanics series, by Robert P. Murphy. The series will be published as a book in 2021.]