The Saturday morning in 1815 that news of peace reached New Orleans, a guy who heard it early made a deal to buy fifty tons of tobacco from a man who didn’t yet know the blockade was ending. The seller, feeling cheated afterward, sued the buyer, but in one of its most important early opinions, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously decided the plaintiff had no recourse: sorry, sucker, in this free market, buyer and seller beware. Telling less than the whole truth—hustling—had received a blanket indemnity. In commerce as in the rest of life, when it came to truth and falsehood, America was a
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