The Commerce Department, which costs $3 billion a year, is touting one of the most brainless economic ideas of our generation. What ought to be called the Anti-Commerce Department announced the concept on Earth Day, which appropriately enough is also Lenin’s birthday.

Frédéric Bastiat was a French economist, a passionate and articulate believer in free enterprise, who lived from 1801 to 1850. But his writings speak to us today, and help explain why the recent conflict with China has ended through diplomacy and peace rather than belligerence and war.

This much we know: prosperous nations have the fewest barriers to trade, while poor nations have the most. That fact alone does not prove the case for free trade, but adding a bit of logic sews up the case.

Journalists pride themselves on their power of observation. It is observation that is the first step toward putting a picture of the world into words and print, bringing to the rest of us an image they have seen but we have not. Journalists are often very good at seeing small pictures, but not big pictures. Actually, in their profession, it is bad form to even attempt to see the big picture until you have reached the highest level of professional achievement.

From left and right, capitalism is condemned for all the cultural failings of the modern world—everything from mindless TV to dirty books to slatternly art to trashy movies to debasing music. It’s an extension of the left-liberal habit of blaming a system for what are actually the failings of individuals.

The political buzz for weeks has centered on whether the Democrats are going to employ the “Taliban Strategy,” claiming that the Republican Party’s right flank is the “Taliban Wing.”

How does the left get away with describing right-wing thought as Talibanish, especially when compared to the left-wing agenda of speech codes, economic regulation, and authoritarian intervention in every aspect of American private life?

The family is an anarchistic institution, G.K. Chesterton wrote. He meant that it requires no act of the state to bring it about. Its existence flows from fixed realities in the nature of man, with its form refined by the development of sexual norms and the advance of civilization.

The anticapitalism of college professors is legendary even if its genesis and basis are somewhat mysterious. If anything should be clear to those who care about evidence, it’s that the market economy is superior to all forms of economic planning. Even minimal amounts of government intervention produce sector-specific stagnation.