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Three women in Mahwah, NJ, were busted Tuesday for trafficking the banned caffeinated alcoholic beverage Four Loko on the Internet

The Michigan Liquor Control Commission on Thursday banned the drink Four Loko and dozens of similar alcoholic drinks from being sold in the state.
For your protection, of course!

With cigarette prices up and the number of smoke-friendly places down, the black market for loosies is now thriving on the streets. Rarely does a minute go by without a customer stopping just long enough to pass a dollar bill to Lonnie Loosie, known to the police by his given name, Lonnie Warner, 50. “The tax went up, and we started selling 10 times as much,” Mr. Warner said.

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.

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

PACK YOUR BAGS... WE'RE GOING TO WAR. YOU WILL NEED: TWO BLACK SHIRTS, TWO PAIR OF BLACK PANTS, ONE PAIR OF BLACK BOOTS, TWO PAIR BLACK SOCKS, ONE BLACK JACKET, BURIAL MONEY, SENSE OF HUMOR (OPTIONAL).

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.

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 ...

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.”