The late Milton Friedman once said that if the average tariff rate in America was a few percentage points lower than it would otherwise be thanks to influence of academic economists, that would more than justify all of their salaries and then some because of the wealth-enhancing effects of freer trade.

Supply and demand have generally been allowed to work in energy markets, resulting in ups and downs in gasoline prices. Whenever gasoline prices go up to any significant degree, the industry is inevitably threatened by Congress with price controls, euphemistically referred to as “anti-price gouging legislation” or some other synonym.

A former MBA student of the author’s who was the director of emergency medicine at a large urban hospital once said that he and his colleagues spent about 90 percent of their time treating the knife and gunshot wounds of drug gang members. His medical preparation for such a job included serving as a surgeon during wartime, which he said came in very handy. Such injuries dominate all such hospitals at tremendous expense.

In government, failure is success. That’s what I call DiLorenzo’s First Law of Government. When the welfare state bureaucracy fails to reduce poverty, it is rewarded with more tax dollars and more responsibilities. When the government schools fail to educate children, they are rewarded with more tax dollars and more power to meddle in education. When NASA blows up a space shuttle, it is rewarded with a large budget increase (unlike a private airline which would probably go bankrupt).

The Dow Jones Industrial Average would be several thousand points higher than it is were it not for government regulation that causes businesses to divert immeasurable time and resources to pandering to government regulators rather than pursuing profits by creating new products, improving existing products and services, and cutting costs and prices. Since expected future profitability is the major ingredient in stock pricing, regulation destroys stock values.

In chapter 5 of F.A. Hayek’s 1944 classic, The Road to Serfdom, the Nobel laureate warned that the state need not directly control all or even most of the means of production to exert totalitarian control over the economic life of a nation. He cited the example of Germany where, as of 1928, “the central and local authorities directly control 53 percent” of the German economy.

When the U.S. government prosecuted the Microsoft Corporation during the 1990s (after a decade of “investigations” that turned up nothing illegal) the head of the U.S. Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, Joel Klein, rationalized the lawsuit by saying that it was in keeping with the long history of consumer protection regulation in America, beginning with the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890.

The “Luddites” were early nineteen century British textile workers who protested the introduction of mechanized looms by destroying them and issuing proclamations denouncing the new technology in the name of the mythical King Ludd of Sherwood Forest. What the Luddites failed to understand—and what today’s neo-Luddites fail to understand—is that “labor-saving technology” that reduces production costs and prices increase consumer demand for the product being produced, which in turn generates more jobs in the industry, not less.

At the heart of the U.S. government’s continued takeover of the healthcare sector of the economy was a law passed during the Obama administration that would eventually drive the private health insurance industry out of business or transform it into a de facto nationalized industry. The law imposed additional taxes and other costs on health insurance companies while creating a government health “insurance” bureaucracy to ostensibly “compete” with private companies.