Even though support for the free market has become stronger in the last decades, libertarianism can still only be considered a fringe movement.

Most reviewers of the motion picture Killers of the Flower Moon distill just one lesson from the story: greed is deadly. The love of money leads to evil. But the real lesson should be of government failure.

Critics of the free market often aim at the wrong target. They assail the market for “failures” that are actually the result of government intervention in the economy. In this week’s column, I’d like to discuss an example of this mistake in Angus Deaton’s Economics in America (Princeton, 2023).

Deaton was the winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize for economics, about which he says:

Regardless of one’s opinion on Israel and Palestine, people can agree that killing innocent civilians, wherever they’re from, is horrible, and whoever takes hostages for bargaining chips in negotiations is a horrific human being.

During the height of the covid-19 pandemic, some politicians and voters advocated for covid vaccine mandates for air travel. And while this proposal has some intuitive pull, there are likely tradeoffs here that could result in more deaths overall as a by-product of increasing the cost and trouble of air travel, incentivizing travelers to choose another form of travel: driving.

Some economists centrally plan the economy, while others research poverty alleviation strategies. In a recent article, aptly titled: Achieving the ‘American dream?’ A lot of it depends on where you grow up, CNBC reported on a study conducted by academics from Harvard and Brown universities revealing that the neighborhood in which you grow up has a lasting influence on your future success in life.

The European Union (EU), Canada and United States (trio) governments placed sanctions on the sale of exported crude oil (oil), natural gas, liquefied natural gas (LNG), some refined petroleum products and coal originating in Russia starting in March 2022 to article publication date. The sanctions resulted from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Oil and natural gas are defined as hydrocarbons.

The first piece of legislation passed by the new Congress of the United States of America after the ratification of the Constitution included a tariff on the import of foreign sugar. Although this tariff was passed as a means to raise the funds needed to pay the debts accrued during the Revolutionary War, coincidentally it also provided elaborate protections to the nation’s wealthiest farmers of sugarcane and sugar beets.

Treasury Secretary and former Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen told a gathering at Bloomberg’s Washington office that the U.S. economy is hunky dory. The third quarter’s increase in GDP at a 4.9% annualized rate means, “It’s a good, strong number and it shows an economy that’s doing very well,” Yellen said.

ESG (environmental, social and governance) investing is all the rage. But Carson Block is targeting ESG companies to sell short. “When we first started shorting companies that were deemed to be ESG, we didn’t have this theme in mind that ESG is the space for grifters,” Block told Bloomberg.