• From Marcus Crassus in ancient Rome, to John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, and Andrew Carnegie during America’s Gilded Age, and Bill Gates today, many have owed vast amounts of their wealth not to brilliant risk-taking, but to legislation designed to suppress market competition.

• It was the tariffs imposed on Ireland in the 1840s that led to the Great Famine, resulting in over a million Irish people losing their lives to starvation.