Commentary: Halloween Is the Night Kids in the U.S.A. Discover Economics

Tomorrow night American kids will observe a tradition not widely celebrated in the rest of the world: Halloween. They will dress up as ghosts, witches, goblins, politicians, and other scary things, then go door to door greeting neighbors with Trick or treat! Residents will drop candy in the bags the children are carrying.

Regardless of anyone’s intention, the tradition nicely demonstrates the creativity of free exchange.

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Border Agents Encountered More Than 2 Million Migrants in 2021

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) ended 2021 with more than 2 million migrant encounters.

December 2021 numbers released Monday showed that border patrol encountered 178,840 migrants at the southern border, a 2% increase from the previous month. The number of encounters in December 2021 was greater than the total number of encounters at the border in the previous three Decembers combined.

Of the migrants encountered in December, 23% of them were previously encountered by border agents in the last year. Single adults made up 64% of the encounters, a 4% increase from November.

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Securities and Exchange Commission to Crack Down on Private Companies, Heighten Disclosure Requirements

Securities and Exchange Commission building

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) plans to crack down on private companies, forcing them to disclose financial and operation statements more frequently, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Regulators have grown more concerned over the lack of oversight regarding private fundraising for companies, the WSJ reported. The private investment market has become a popular way for companies to raise money without undergoing the regulatory scrutiny required for public trading.

“When they’re big firms, they can have a huge impact on thousands of people’s lives with absolutely no visibility for investors, employees and their unions, regulators, or the public,” SEC Commissioner Allison Lee told the WSJ. “I’m not interested in forcing medium- and small-sized companies into the reporting regime.”

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Commentary: The Republican Party’s Multiethnic, Working-Class Coalition Is Taking Shape

In the 2016 Republican Party presidential primary, decades of dissonance between the party’s aggrieved grassroots and its blinkered elite spilled out into the open. For years, the chasm widened between the GOP’s heartland base, the river valley-dwelling “Somewheres” from David Goodhart’s 2017 book, The Road to Somewhere, and the party’s bicoastal “Anywhere” rulers. The foot-soldier Republican “Somewheres,” disproportionately church-attending and victimized by job outsourcing and the opioid crisis, felt betrayed by the more secular, ideologically inflexible Republican “Anywheres.”

Donald Trump, lifelong conservative “outsider” and populist dissenter from bicoastal “Anywhere” orthodoxy on issues pertaining to trade, immigration, and China, coasted to the GOP’s presidential nomination. He did so notwithstanding the all-hands-on-deck pushback from leading right-leaning “Anywhere” bastions, encapsulated by National Review magazine’s dedication of an entire issue to, “Against Trump.” Trump’s subsequent victory in the 2016 general election sent the conservative intellectual movement, as well as the Republican Party itself, into a deep state of introspection.

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