Thomas Sowell on media lies and manipulation of statistics: "Black women who have only a high school education but who are married — their children have lower infant mortality rates than white women who have a college education who are unwed mothers. So it's not race. It's not income. It's not education. It's lifestyle. The anointed in the media can't accept this."

In 1968, while teenage Red Guards beat their professors to death with clubs in Beijing courtyards, Jean-Paul Sartre sat in Paris calling Mao's Cultural Revolution a model of revolutionary democracy. The most celebrated intellectual in France looked at a country burning its own libraries and saw liberation. He sold the Maoist newspaper La Cause du Peuple on French street corners himself, holding it aloft like a sacrament. Consider what he was endorsing. Between 1966 and 1976, the Cultural Revolution killed somewhere between 500,000 and two million people. Schools shut down across the entire country. Students dragged teachers onto stages, hung placards around their necks, forced them to kneel on broken glass, then murdered them. The historian Bian Zhongyun, vice-principal of a girls' school in Beijing, died on August 5, 1966, beaten by her own students with nail-studded clubs. Sartre called this the people governing themselves. You should understand why a man this intelligent got it this wrong. Sartre believed knowledge served power, that truth was whatever the revolution required, that the individual existed to be dissolved into the collective will. So when Mao abolished the distinction between teacher and student, between expert and mob, Sartre cheered. He had spent decades arguing that bourgeois reason was a class weapon. Here was a regime taking him at his word and clubbing the reasoners to death. This is what economic illiteracy buys you. A university, a price, a contract, and a peasant's grain stockpile all carry knowledge that no central planner can seize or replicate. Mises explained the calculation problem in 1920. Hayek explained dispersed knowledge in 1945. Sartre had access to both and chose the dunce cap of the collective instead, then handed out its propaganda on the Rue de Rennes. He died in 1980, mourned by 50,000 followers, never having retracted a word about Mao. The professors of Beijing got no such funeral. They got a ditch, and a philosopher in Paris explaining that their murder was freedom.

"Shall we remain as we are, solid, compact, impregnable, republican, American?" "Americanism Versus Imperialism" Andrew Carnegie, Jan 1899 cooperative-individualism.or…

BREAKING: President Trump publicly rebukes Israel over its war against Hezbollah. "Israel's fighting Hezbollah too long and too many people are being killed." Trump said he opposed strikes that destroy apartment buildings filled with civilians and revealed he urged Israel to let Syria take the lead against Hezbollah instead. "If Israel can't do the job without killing everyone else, he'll do the job. Syria will do the job."

71% of Americans favor Congress creating an independent National Commission composed of nonpartisan experts on Social Security reform and giving them the authority to solve Social Security’s budget problems, finds a recent Cato Institute/YouGov poll. ow.ly/AG2F50ZaHE3

Authoritarians Weaponize American Financial Laws cato.org/blog/authoritarians… via @CatoInstitute

Obama's White House smeared U Colorado prof @RogerPielkeJr after he questioned the climate apocalypse. His speeches were canceled. Colorado closed his research center & put his office in a closet. But he didn’t give up. How activists tried and FAILED to cancel a good scientist:

Europeans discovering America is some of the best content of the internet right now:

Senator Bernie Sanders wants Washington to own a major stake in leading AI companies. President Trump wants the government to take equity stakes, too. Both risk turning AI policy from a framework for innovation into a vehicle for state control, argue Cato scholars @jrhuddles and @DeHavenTad. The history of American technology policy is clear: light-touch regulation works best. ow.ly/vPuL50ZbTCt

Modern economics built elaborate mathematical models of how markets work. Israel Kirzner spent six decades pointing out the same problem with every one of them: the agent that actually makes markets work does not appear in any of them. 🧵

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In 1973, less than half of new US homes had AC. Today that's risen to 98%. The technology has also gotten cleaner: modern AC units run 30-50% more efficiently than older ones.

A negotiated agreement between the US and Iran was likely achievable without the war, argues Cato’s @JustinTLogan. “Americans have suffered billions of dollars in economic damage, 13 deaths, and hundreds of service members wounded—and many people in the Middle East have been killed—because of a war without any justification.”

Gross racial disproportionality in pro basketball.

Doug Bandow participates in the event, “Should the US Go to War if China Invades Taiwan?,” hosted by Zerohedge cato.org/multimedia/media-hi… via @CatoInstitute

"If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization." — Ludwig von Mises

Thomas Sowell: "One of the most dangerous trends of our time is making the truth socially unacceptable, or even illegal, with 'hate speech laws'."

The UK is rapidly turning into a Chinese-style surveillance state. Of course, Bluesky escapes the ban.

“The real goal should be reduced government spending, rather than balanced budgets achieved by ever rising tax rates to cover ever rising spending.” — Thomas Sowell

Quote of the Week | Friedrich August von Hayek