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Black-market cigarettes are costing many states hundreds of millions of dollars a year in lost tax revenue. And the lucrative, illicit trade is attracting violent criminal gangs that can be lethally ruthless.

And the Four Loko black market begins. Police do a sting operation and women face up to three years in jail.

The availability of menthol-flavored cigarettes is linked to a rise in the number of children and African Americans who smoke and the cigarettes should be taken off the market, an FDA advisory committee said Friday.

New York Times....
Contrast “This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.”
-with-
“This guy looks like he’s up to no good. Or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.” Then the dispatcher asked, “O.K., and this guy — is he white, black or Hispanic?” Only then did Mr. Zimmerman say, “He looks black.”

If all the world’s informal markets were formed into a single independent nation, its $10 trillion economy would be the second-largest on the planet (behind only the US). These markets thrive in places where taxes are low, poverty is high, and resources are scarce. The colors on this map indicate the size of each country’s underground economy, as a percentage of its GDP

The company also began embedding each film distributed to theaters and critics with a unique identifier, so that Warner could trace leaked and pirated movies back to their source. But, in a piece of delicious irony, it seems that Warner Bros. may have actually stolen this technology from a German company called Medien Patent Verwaltung (MPV).

An excellent article from Reason magazine about a large, prospering city in China supported entirely by the black market.

For as long as there have been laws, there have been black markets to sell whatever those laws prohibit -- drugs, guns, whatever Han Solo was shipping on behalf of Jabba during his smuggler days. But not every law is as clear-cut as "machine guns and heroin are bad," and not every black market item is as menacing as those. In fact, you'd be utterly baffled to see what's getting traded in the shadows these days, considering it includes things like ...

Tom Woods calls this article "one of the most interesting and startling articles I have read in a long time."

In 2009, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a think tank sponsored by the governments of 30 of the most powerful capitalist countries and dedicated to promoting free-market institutions, concluded that half the workers of the world -- close to 1.8 billion people -- were working in System D: off the books, in jobs that were neither registered nor regulated, getting paid in cash, and, most often, avoiding income taxes.