Nearly everyone complains about capitalism’s defects, or market failures. In fact, those are social failures, not specifically market failures, which show up when many rational individual actions create a social situation that displeases everyone. This means that government dirigisme — state direction or displacement of the market — cannot be a remedy because who do you think staffs the government and how do they get there? A big difference between the two systems — market and state — is that while the market diminishes social defects, the government magnifies them.
Trump’s Tariffs Made His Farm Bailouts Inevitable
In the comic theater of American politics, few spectacles are as reliably absurd as the utopian promises of protectionism. Donald Trump's tariffs, hailed by their proponents as a bold strike against foreign exploitation, have instead proven to be a blunt instrument of...






























