Economic law cannot be repealed, but its verdict can often be long suspended, if usually at the cost of a harsher sentence when ingenuity finally fails those seeking to deny its implacable judgement.

And the fact that Smith was a behavioral economist long before behavioral economics was cool is significant. It reveals that an understanding of human foibles, passions, and cognitive quirks does not (contrary to today’s irrational presumption) necessarily strengthen the case for greater government intervention. Smith, remember, strongly advocated keeping markets free. He did so not because free markets are perfect or because individuals are “rational,” but because free markets are less imperfect than regulated ones and because he wisely distrusted any of us disposition-effected, loss-averting, confirmation-biased, hyperbolic-discounting, and otherwise foible-infected humans with the power to order others about.

The plight of the gypsies in this case illustrates very clearly, how in the absence of strong private property rights there is frequently a ‘tyranny of the majority’. Without strong protection of property unpopular minorities wishing to live ‘alternative life styles’ will always be subject to arbitrary interventions supposedly in the name of the ‘common good’.

Why, then, are the ignorant not merely so much more passionate, but so much more certain? It is a great mystery. But I think we could vastly improve the policy discussion by requiring everyone to write 100-word essays on what their preferred policy actually is, before they are allowed to talk about it.

All in all, free trade makes us more prosperous. It even discourages military hostilities. But the most common argument of pro-free-trade politicians and pundits is wrong: Free trade does not “create jobs” – if that means adding to the total number of paying jobs in the domestic economy. Free trade neither creates nor eliminates jobs overall. (Likewise for protectionism.) What free trade does do is create different and better jobs by destroying older and worse jobs.

So much for the rule of law, they’re making it up as they go along now. If anyone dares utter the word “capitalism” to describe this end-stage of central planning of money, credit, discount, and interest (the Fed), moral hazard “insurance” (FDIC), endless tinkering (Community Reinvestment Act, Glass-Steagall, Nationally Recognized Statistical Ratings Organization in the 1970′s, etc.), monetary policy, fiscal policy, “Too Big to Fail”, I will scream bloody murder. Mussolini described our system as follows: Government and business working together, the only way they can: against their less-connected competitors, customers, and taxpayers. Mussolini had a name for it: Fascism