There are a lot of things companies do to fool consumers, some more meaningful than others. They pack items in large boxes to make them look bigger, they offer questionable claims about their products' effectiveness, they weave absurd tales about how your life will be changed if you buy their thing. Navigating your way through that thicket of baloney is part of being a smart consumer, and to a degree we accept it as part of the price of having free commercial speech. Short of outright fraud or practices that do substantial harm to consumers, we understand that people who are selling things can say almost anything they want, and we accept that being a consumer means that manufacturers and retailers are going to try to fool you. In the immortal words of Morty Seinfeld, "Cheap fabric and dim lighting. That's how you move merchandise."

But there are some kinds of deception that are beyond the pale. It's one thing to sell you something that might not be up to your expectations; perhaps your expectations were just too high. It's something else to fool you into buying one thing, when you actually wanted to buy something else. I give you the modern American gas pump...

While the global economy is still on shaky terrain, Apple is having a good 2012. In the first quarter, the tech behemoth sold 35 million iPhones—an 88 percent increase from last year, representing 59.7 percent of Apple's overall sales—and 11.8 million iPads. These sales nearly doubled Apple's profits, and sent Apple's stocks up 7 percent, up $40.55 to $600.83 yesterday.

The Social Security Trustees have just projected that the date by which the system will no longer be able to meet all of its payouts has been moved up three years from 2036 to 2033. This has prompted the usual clucking about the need for drastic benefit cuts of partial privatization right now. 

What nobody seems to have noticed is that the primary reason for the pessimistic forecast is the lousy economy, particularly the high unemployment and depressed wages. Social Security is of course financed by payroll taxes. There’s no better way to put the system into the red than to have a recession and to have 93 percent of the gains to go to the top one percent (whose payroll taxes are capped).

François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy will face off in a May 6 runoff election after the Socialist challenger won 28.6 percent of the vote in the first round of the French presidential elections yesterday.

In the latest issue of the magazine, I have a piece examining a strange and growing trend in some conservative circles—pushing states to adopt alternative currencies to the federal dollar. The basic concern is one you've probably heard from Ron Paul: The Federal Reserve can't be trusted, the national debt is out of control, so the U.S. dollar, backed only by faith in the government, may become worthless. (The story outlines some of the more obvious economic problems with this theory.)

To deal with the concern, problem-solving state lawmakers have started introducing bills to create a second currency, one of gold and silver. Sounds like a fringe concept right? 

It is a well-known maxim that to keep repeating the same action and expect a different result is a symptom of madness. It is hard to find a different way to account for the persistence of Eurozone leaders in inflicting punishing austerity on countries belonging to the common currency, a strategy that has proved both fiscally ineffective and socially destructive.

In recent days, the focus of the crisis has returned to Spain, and for good reason. The country suffers from the highest unemployment rate in Europe: 24 percent, and it’s more than 50 percent among those 15 to 24. Despite this catastrophic state of affairs, the relatively new, conservative Spanish government—elected last November with 46 percent of the vote on a platform of austerity and structural reform—recently unveiled a budget proposal that, in the words of Budget Minister Cristobal Montoro, is the strictest since the death of Franco in 1975. The total fiscal adjustment for 2012 is a massive 27 billion euros. The goal is to bring Spain’s budget deficit down from 8.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) to 5.3 percent.