Socialism and the Decline of the Black Family

Children need fathers, but social fragmentation gives an advantage to those who seek centralized power

By Jason Riley. Excerpts:

"socialism’s impact on the traditional family structure is no less concerning. Children from intact families are more likely to finish school and avoid poverty. The absence of fathers is strongly correlated with teen parenthood, drug addiction and involvement with the criminal justice system. The cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote that “every known human society rests firmly on the learned nurturing behavior of men” and that civilization “depends upon social inventions that will make each generation of males want to nurture women and children.”"

"socialists such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels dismissed the traditional family as a tool of oppression"

"many of the social and economic problems in low-income black communities stem from the sad fact that some 70% of black children are born to unwed parents and nearly 45% live with a single mother."

"Asians are the highest earners, followed by whites, Hispanics and blacks. Similarly, Asians have the highest marriage rates, followed by whites, Hispanics and blacks. Maybe it’s no coincidence."

"Following emancipation, one of the first things black people did was seek out spouses and children from whom they had been forcibly separated during slavery."

"Between 1890 and 1950, black men and women married earlier and were more likely to be married by 35 than their white peers, Mr. Squires writes. That suggests black attitudes toward marriage and child rearing today are the product of incentives and circumstances that developed long after the end of slavery. “More than 70 percent of black children were born to married parents in 1965—a century after the abolition of slavery,” Mr. Squires writes. “Today, only 30 percent are."

"The black family was more intact after three centuries of chattel slavery than after three generations of the federal government’s ‘war’ on poverty.”" 

‘Communion’ Review: The Veep’s Progress

JD Vance recounts his conversion to Catholicism and explains what he calls a ‘Christian approach to economics.’

By Barton Swaim. He reviewed the book Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith.

"You might have thought the esteem in which he holds working folk, together with his disdain for elites who presume to know what other people need, would have led Mr. Vance to appreciate laissez-faire economics, presuming as it does that ordinary people generally know how to use their own resources more wisely than faraway eggheads. And maybe he almost did plump for free markets at one time. Early in the book, in a passage I’m tempted to think he forgot to cut, he makes the point that religious questions often involve hidden complexities. Mr. Vance draws a comparison with minimum-wage laws, which, he notes, seem like a great idea but “could do more harm than good” by dissuading employers from hiring more workers. His lesson: “The complexity counsels some humility in the face of difficult questions.”

That bit appears in Chapter 2. By Chapter 11, “A Dismal Science,” Mr. Vance has cast humility aside. Straw men populate the book’s later chapters, particularly on economic questions. He equates the free-market outlook with amoral indifference to anything apart from abstract economic-growth numbers. Reciting stories of people trampling one another to buy new tech products on Black Friday, Mr. Vance observes that “from the view of classical economics, they’re doing something far more ‘productive’ than reading a book or spending time with their children.”

Having several years ago read Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical “Rerum novarum,” in which the pope sought to enunciate an economic outlook that avoided both socialism and capitalism, Mr. Vance attempts to express his own “Christian approach to economics,” which amounts to little more than the prescription that economic actors should exercise kindness, mercy and generosity. Employers, Mr. Vance accordingly thinks, should pay workers a fair or living wage. He doesn’t say who would define “fair” and “living”—Labor Department bureaucrats?

In one passage of egregious sloppiness, Mr. Vance quotes a paper by Vanessa Brown Calder, formerly of the Cato Institute, in which she explains the perverse effects of mandatory parental-leave benefits. “A review of states and countries with government-mandated paid leave programs indicates they harm young women,” Ms. Calder writes. “This is because parental leave policies are associated with an increase in leave-taking and childbearing, which leads to lost labor or increased health care costs for companies.” Mr. Vance fulminates: “Never have I read a purer distillation of our worship at the altar of commerce.” If he had read the paper more carefully, or even the next sentence, he would have noticed Ms. Calder’s argument: that mandated parental-leave laws discourage companies from hiring women at all, and that a host of other reforms would give them the freedom to start families without encouraging firms to penalize them."

‘The Permanent Problem’ Review: The Soul and the Market

Critics allege that capitalism causes spiritual poverty. They misunderstand the proper role of an economic system

By Judge Glock. He reviewed the book The Permanent Problem: The Uncertain Transition from Mass Plenty to Mass Flourishing by Brink Lindsey. Excerpts:

"One wonders if Mr. Lindsey thinks capitalism is preventing people from organizing community gardens. If their adoption isn’t universal, one struggles to understand why we should demand that people plant them. And how many in the author’s crowd have done their part to restore civilization by moving into co-housing units, spaces typically reserved for impecunious 20-somethings? Perhaps the simplest explanation for the limited impact of these practices is that they work for some people but not for others.

Similar desires for small-scale production have a long history. John Ruskin, a Victorian art critic, raged at how the division of labor broke down traditional communities and turned people into automatons. William Morris, in the novel “News From Nowhere” (1890), imagined a world in which people returned to small-scale gardening and gave up shoddy consumerism. In the 1960s and ’70s, communal radicals and intellectuals such as E.F. Schumacher, in his book “Small Is Beautiful” (1973), made similar demands."

"no critic has attacked all consumption of all goods, only the goods the critic considered unnecessary."

"The other term for making things more affordable is economic growth—something that is ineluctably in conflict with a vision of producing more goods outside the market."

"He suggests more people could “build their own housing.” Beyond the fact that this would make housing immeasurably more expensive, these personal homebuilders would still have to buy the nails, lumber, shingles and—since the author is not a Luddite—communications and electrical wiring, HVAC systems and other complex goods from the market."

"The author recommends a domestic service corps, modeled on the military, to build infrastructure"

"Mr. Lindsey assures the reader that a government redistribution of goods will help people declare independence from both government and market." 

Should we recriminalize marijuana?

By Tyler Cowen.

"The present and also future of mankind is a world where reasonably high levels of self-discipline are needed to do well. The journalist Daniel Akst pointed this out in his 2011 book Temptation: Finding Self-Control in an Age of Excess, and we are now living it full force.

I would rather cope with that world than face the full nanny state, backed by modern, AI-intensified surveillance techniques to boot. Concentrating more power in political authorities hardly solves the basic problem. If marijuana and sports gambling can manipulate weak individuals, so can unscrupulous political leaders. A greater realization of individual weakness does not translate into a case for more government action; if anything, it suggests the opposite. Better to allow our social problems to fester in a more decentralized fashion, rather than reinforce our social pathologies through a manipulative and dysfunctional leader at the very top.

In the longer term, we may need to look to medications, such as GLP-1 drugs and their offshoots, which seem to curb some forms of addictive behavior beyond the appetite for food. Alternatively, some individuals may choose self-surveillance, with self-imposed penalties for bad or addictive behavior. Perhaps your AI, or a hired third party, docks your bank account every time you puff on a joint. I am not convinced such services ever will become popular, but that should be taken seriously as an indicator of what people really want to do. We can at least give them better options for self-constraint. If they rarely choose such options, then perhaps for many of those people, marijuana consumption is not a matter of weakness but a very well-established preference, whether we like it or not…

In short, it is time to realize that paternalism is far less workable than in times past. Our government does not have the credibility, the control over information, or the control over our lives to pull it off.

I do understand that is in some significant ways bad news, as voluntary choice is overwhelming some of us with bad outcomes.

My response is to start by accepting some steps backward, holding paternalist tyranny at bay, and hoping some longer-run cultural and technological adjustments will make this all more workable.

If you have a better solution, I would love to hear it."

What Would Jefferson and Madison Make of Musk and Altman?

America’s Founders and Adam Smith knew better than to entrust the future to philosopher-kings

By Jason Riley. Excerpt:

"Theories about the need for a “philosopher king” or “great man” to advance society date back centuries. Intellectual figures from Plato to Machiavelli and Thomas Carlyle emphasized personal traits such as superior wisdom and exceptional moral character in choosing leaders. The idea was to find these extraordinary men, put them in charge, and align policies with their understanding of the common good. Adam Smith, by contrast, argued that free enterprise and the uncoordinated pursuit of individual self-interest would lead to better outcomes for more people. Societies should rely on market forces and voluntary exchange rather than on do-gooders.

March marked the 250th anniversary of Smith’s seminal text, “The Wealth of Nations,” published the same year as the Declaration of Independence. As we reflect on America’s milestone, it’s worth noting that the Founders shared Smith’s skepticism of philosopher-kings and the approach to choosing leaders that today’s AI poohbahs seem to have embraced.

“What the American Constitution established was not simply a particular system but a process for changing systems, practices, and leaders, together with a method of constraining whoever or whatever was ascendent at any give time,” Thomas Sowell wrote in his book on social theory, “The Quest for Cosmic Justice.” “Viewed positively, what the American revolution did was to give the common man a voice, a veto, elbow room and a refuge from the rampaging presumptions of his ‘betters.’ ”" 

The Panic Industry’s New Target

A generation coached to fear climate change is now fretting over AI and data centers

By Barton Swaim. Excerpts:

"Where does Mr. Schmidt think young people got the idea that “the climate is breaking”? Where did the “fear” he laments come from? In part from the scores of climate-panic groups to which the Schmidt Family Foundation’s 11th Hour Project has granted hundreds of millions of dollars over the last 20 years. One detail particularly amuses: When 11th Hour first appeared, in 2006, it funded screenings of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” a documentary designed to terrorize viewers with 90 minutes of bleak prophecies, now happily exploded. The outfit, like scores of others founded and funded by other progressive billionaires, spends its resources opposing fossil-based energy and trumpeting the dangers of a warming world."

"Last year Bill Gates posted an essay on his website purporting to scold alarmists and express his own moderate view of the climate question, namely that it is a “very important problem” but doesn’t doom civilization. You have to wonder, then, why Mr. Gates has sent so much of his money to Arabella Advisors. Arabella, a pass-through entity now called Sunflower Services, funds a dizzying array of groups that exist to alarm the public over an imminent climate apocalypse and to portray carbon-emitting energy as an existential threat to humanity."

"nobody staffing the multibillion-dollar ganglion of climate nonprofits and activist groups plans on taking a more measured view of the coming cataclysm."

"modern data centers first appeared in the 1990s, when companies learned the benefits of fast internet connectivity and information storage."

"the people showing up at county council meetings to protest the construction of a data center . . . got their talking points from national nonprofits supported by some of the same moneyed outfits the Schmidt and Gates foundations spent the last two decades bankrolling." 

Academia's Leftward March

By Steve Stewart-Williams. Excerpts:

"According to a recent paper by Nathan Honeycutt, 74% of US faculty identify as liberal, 15% as moderate, and only 11% as conservative. Remarkably, more faculty identify as “far left” or “very liberal” than with any position right of center."

"The first graph shows the increasing dominance of the left in academia from the late 1960s to the early 2020s. As you can see, liberals and leftists have always outnumbered the rest, but the skew has grown increasingly strong over time. And not only have conservatives become vanishingly rare, so have centrists."

 

The "Great Awokening" Had a Strong Upper-Class Accent

From Marco M. Aviña.

Abstract 

"Recent scholarship hails rising racial liberalism among white liberals as a racial reckoning and even a “Great Awokening.” I find that affluent white liberals led these changes. I develop a status-signaling account in which members of this group, embedded in dense, politically homogeneous social environments, face competing reputational and gatekeeping incentives to express alignment with racial equality in principle but not in policy. I leverage the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing Black Lives Matter protests as a focusing event when anti-racist norms surged. Using regression-discontinuity-in-time and event-study designs on national public opinion surveys and local public meeting transcripts, I show that post-Floyd movement was concentrated among high-income white liberals, centered on symbolic engagement rather than material policy commitments—whether universalistic or group-targeted—and short-lived. Finally, I provide evidence consistent with this account: post-Floyd, an income gap emerges in implicit bias testing, a form of self-monitoring, but not in implicit bias scores, which are less amenable to impression management. These findings complicate narratives of racial progress and recast the “Great Awokening” as recognitional politics without commensurate redistribution, consistent with concerns about elite capture in identity politics."

The Warmth of Cooperation

By Chris Freiman.

"New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently caused something of an uproar when he contrasted the “the frigidity of rugged individualism” with the “warmth of collectivism.” This framing echoes the familiar criticism that capitalism forces people to go it alone as “atomistic individuals.” The thought goes like this: markets do real damage to the social fabric and our relationships because they organize our economic lives around competition and self-interest. Organizing our lives around competition encourages people to see each other as rivals rather than partners. In brief, capitalism pits us against each other, while socialism brings us together. Setting aside the fact that collectivist regimes haven’t exactly been warm to those living under them, this view gets capitalism backward.

Start with a simple observation about your own economic life under capitalism. Think about this week: how many cooperative interactions have you had, and how many competitive ones?

You probably didn’t compete with anyone when you bought coffee at Starbucks this morning. You didn’t enter a zero-sum struggle when you paid your phone bill, purchased groceries and gas, or caught a movie. Instead, you took part in a series of mutually beneficial, voluntary transactions. You gave someone money and they gave you something you wanted more than the money. Everyone walked away better off. In the words of Adam Smith, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

Competition, by contrast, rarely pops up in your day-to-day economic life. A business competes with other businesses for customers and you’ve probably competed with others for a job at some point. But you cooperate far more often than you compete. And notice what market competitions really are—they’re competitions to see who’s best at serving others. You might say that they’re competitions to discover the best ways to cooperate and who the best cooperators are (more on this below).

Unsurprisingly, Smith understood the cooperative nature of markets well. He writes that a wool coat

is the produce of the joint labour of a great multitude of workmen. The shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the wool-comber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser, with many others, must all join their different arts in order to complete even this homely production. How many merchants and carriers, besides, must have been employed in transporting the materials from some of those workmen to others who often live in a very distant part of the country! How much commerce and navigation in particular, how many ship-builders, sailors, sail-makers, rope-makers, must have been employed in order to bring together the different drugs made use of by the dyer, which often come from the remotest corners of the world!

Smith goes on, but I’ve got a word limit here—the point is that markets don’t atomize us. On the contrary, they lead strangers all over the world to cooperate.

Think back to the last time you bought a coffee. Starbucks has to coordinate with bean farmers, shipping companies, truck drivers, warehouse workers, roasters, equipment manufacturers, electricians, plumbers, accountants, and baristas. None of these people know you, and yet they manage, every day, to cooperate in ways that reliably get caffeine in your hand at 7:43 a.m. And this isn’t accidental—the prices provided by markets give people the information they need to figure out what others want, and they provide the incentive to give it to them.

There’s no denying that markets involve competition. You can go to the business section of a bookstore and find titles like Business Warfare and The Warfare of Business. But businesses are competing with each other to see who can best serve consumers. Netflix beat Blockbuster by figuring out a better way to give viewers what they wanted: convenience, selection, no late fees, and eventually streaming. In brief, Netflix won because consumers preferred cooperating with Netflix over Blockbuster.

A similar point applies to competition in the job market. Maybe you don’t merely want to buy coffee from Starbucks, you want to work there, too. But this means you’ll have to compete with other applicants who also want the job. Here again, let’s look at what it takes for an applicant to win this competition. They need to demonstrate that they’ll do the best job of making customers better off—say, by being more punctual, more efficient at making mochas, or more likely to serve drinks with a smile. Market competition is competition to see who can cooperate most effectively with others.

In any case, democratic socialists can’t be opposed to all competition. After all, democracy requires competition, and democratic socialists want democracy in the workplace as well as in politics. If competing for dollars is frigid, it’s hard to see why competing for votes would be any warmer. Market competition enables millions of people with different values, plans, and priorities to work together without agreeing on much of anything by helping them to coordinate many different choices. You and your barista don’t need to agree on the principles of justice to cooperate and make each other better off. Far from being atomizing or frigid, the free market is a system of interdependence that brings strangers together to cooperate for their mutual benefit."

Yale Takes Itself to Reform School

A faculty study agrees with many of academia’s critics, believe it or not

WSJ editorial. Excerpts:

"the critique: rising tuition that prices out the middle class; an explosion in bureaucracy that steals resources from instruction; runaway grade inflation; an opaque admissions process that prizes race, gender and identity over achievement; disdain for America’s founding and its abiding principles; and a largely left-wing monoculture that discourages honest (or any) debate, among other sins."

"Yale’s report by an internal Committee on Trust in Higher Education treats those criticisms with respect and in many cases agrees with them."

"Trump. They essentially agree with the criticism about rising costs, admissions that lack transparency, and the failure to support free speech on campus and genuine academic freedom." 

The New Muckrakers Find Who’s Gouging California’s Drivers

By Craig Eyermann of The Independent Institute.

"Over ninety years ago, muckraking author Upton Sinclair ran a failed campaign to become California’s governor in 1934. He later recounted the experience in his very forgettable book, except for one quote, “I, Candidate for Governor, and How I Got Licked.”

The one quote that stands out in Sinclair’s account of his campaign stumping is this one:

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

There is perhaps no better quote to understand California’s politicians. Today, there is perhaps no better example of this insight at work than California Governor Gavin Newsom’s ongoing efforts to find evidence of oil companies gouging California consumers. Writing in the Sacramento Bee in March 2025, Nicole Nixon recounts Newsom’s quixotic quest:

Two years after California’s Democratic leaders declared victory over big oil with a law aiming to crack down on industry profits, the state has been unable to prove companies engage in price gouging when the cost of gasoline spikes in California.

Since late 2022, Gov. Gavin Newsom has accused the oil industry of ripping off California drivers, pointing to an extreme price spike in the state compared to the rest of the country – while companies reported record profits.

“Open your books and prove that you’re not price gouging. Otherwise, you – big oil – will pay the price, not consumers,” then-Sen. Nancy Skinner said after Newsom signed the bill she authored that created an industry watchdog division and gave the California Energy Commission authority to cap oil company profits and return funds to taxpayers.

But the state hasn’t leveled any penalties on oil refining companies since the law passed and has even stopped posting the data it required.

California’s politicians and the bureaucrats at the state’s Energy Commission are a perfect example of people whose salaries depend on their not understanding things. They could never find evidence of “Big Oil” gouging California consumers because there never was any to find. It was all a scheme aimed at low-information California voters to keep them from getting angry enough to vote out the state’s ruling politicians.

This recent history is front and center today because the price of a gallon of gasoline in California has once again spiked above that in every other state.

Only now, a new generation of muckraking journalists dug into the story of why California’s fuel prices are so much higher than in every other state and found the real culprit. Here is a bullet point summary of what CBS News California discovered after just six months of investigating:

• Why California gas costs more: Higher taxes, labor and business costs, combined with environmental programs, regulations, and the state’s unique fuel blend, drive up baseline prices.
• The political narrative is shifting: After failing to prove price gouging — and grappling with the impact of two shuttered refineries — state leaders are now publicly acknowledging the need to incentivize oil companies to stay.
• Why refineries are leaving: Rising costs, increasing regulations, long-term policy uncertainty, and shrinking returns
• Why global conflict matters: California’s growing reliance on overseas refining is increasing volatility — and validating long-standing industry warnings that outsourcing refining increases the risk of price spikes.

It turns out that 55% of the price of a gallon of gasoline in California is due to factors specific to California, especially those imposed by the state government. Amazingly, the state reports that it collects more in taxes per gallon than oil companies make in profit.

California’s politicians are the ones gouging California’s consumers. But don’t expect them to do anything about it because their salaries depend on their not understanding it."

Banks, Regulators and ‘Reputational Risk’

A new Trump rule would bar debanking for political reasons

WSJ editorial. Excerpts:

"Regulators are supposed to supervise banks for safety and soundness. That means their management of financial risks. But Congressional investigations dating to the Obama years have found cases of examiners jaw-boning banks to deny services to customers that allegedly pose a “reputational risk,” such as payday lenders, gun retailers and crypto."

"What is a reputational risk? Regulators have never clearly defined the term"

It has "proven nearly impossible to assess or quantify with accuracy"

"Banks say . . . they have felt pressure by regulators to close accounts tagged as reputational risks." 

ESG May Be Eating Away at Your Investments

Trump and the SEC affirm fiduciary duty, benefiting even shareholders with nonfinancial objectives

By Phil Gramm and Jeb Hensarling. Excerpts:

"Pursuing ESG objectives without the investor’s expressed consent has been part of a thinly veiled attempt by progressives to coerce investment managers and private corporations to advance their political goals and not the investors’ interest. This process began in 2006 when United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan announced the Principles for Responsible Investment initiative. Loud activists with anticarbon and pro-DEI agendas have colluded with asset managers to push through hundreds of corporate stockholder resolutions contrary to the financial interests of general investors."

"ESG constraints produce lower returns while delivering few environmental or social benefits"

"ESG investment funds have often fostered the illusion that investors are supporting more “sustainable” environmental outcomes while earning similar risk-adjusted returns. Rarely is that the case over extended periods. ESG investment funds routinely rely on unproven and inconsistent analytics. Weighting investments in companies based on carbon or DEI metrics means, logically, that more important factors of financial performance are underweighted. The predictable financial underperformance of ESG funds is made worse by higher management fees."

"In most ESG investing, no systematic effort is made to verify the claimed nonpecuniary impact of the investment, and government regulators have, as far as we can tell, assumed impact investors have opted out of fiduciary protections. Conflicts of interest among advisers are rampant. Proxy adviser Institutional Shareholder Services, for example, advises companies on shareholder ESG proposals and then turns around and sells the same companies ESG ratings."

"ESG investments are “not making much difference to companies’ actual ESG performance” and that they “perform poorly in financial terms.”" 

Cuban Regime Wants Diaspora to Own Businesses on the Island

In a diplomatic overture, the Communist regime is aiming to open up its moribund economy to the affluent Cuban-American diaspora

By Deborah Acosta, Vera Bergengruen and José de Córdoba of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"Cuba’s communist regime wants to open up its moribund economy to the Cuban-American diaspora, allowing foreign-based entrepreneurs to open up businesses and buy property"

"the government is open to having a fluid commercial relationship “with Cubans residing in the United States and their descendants.”"

"also open to having a relationship with U.S. companies. He said Cuba wants to energize sectors of the Cuban economy ranging from real estate to tourism and infrastructure."

"Under Cuba’s current law, Cuban-Americans can invest in the island only if they re-establish residency in Cuba, which leaves them at the mercy of a totalitarian regime. Removing this and other hurdles could transform the diaspora into a recognized foreign investor class." 

Why Johnny Can’t Read Anything Other Than Pronouns

Schools have become laboratories for esoteric ideological projects, not centers of learning

By Jason L. Riley. Excerpts:

"One of the few bright spots in our education system has been selective-enrollment public high schools, which use standardized tests and other objective measures to determine admissions. Examples include Boston Latin School in Massachusetts, Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan and Thomas Jefferson High School in Alexandria, Va., all of which boast long and proven records of providing a rigorous education for students from all backgrounds. Yet even this successful model is increasingly under attack, and its future is uncertain.

A new study from the Manhattan Institute details efforts in Chicago to eliminate selective public high schools. Much of the Chicago public school system is in shambles. Wirepoints, a government watchdog group, reported last year that the Chicago Public School system operated 53 schools in 2024 where not a single student tested proficient in math, and 17 schools in which no student tested proficient in reading. Mayor Brandon Johnson and other Democrats blame these outcomes on a lack of resources, but spending per pupil has almost doubled since 2017, and teacher pay in the Windy City is among the highest in the nation for large school districts after adjusting for cost of living."

"Critics of selective public schools claim that they serve too few minority students, divert resources from traditional schools, and exacerbate racial and economic achievement gaps. Yet the Manhattan Institute’s assessment found that at least a third of the students at selective high schools in Chicago come from low-income families, and Chicago Public Schools spend thousands more per student on nonselective schools."

Don’t Mourn the Washington Post’s Decline

Information is richer and more accessible than ever

Letter to The WSJ.

"I have a lot of respect for Peggy Noonan, and I share her view expressed in “A Lament for the Washington Post” (Declarations, Feb. 7) that a robust, inquisitive press is an essential part of a functioning democracy. But I don’t see the end of the Washington Post (if that’s what happens) as much of a loss.

The journalism practiced by the Post in recent years has mainly been of the sort lately taught in journalism schools. Woke, ideological, biased—a loyal ally of the Democratic party. It told us Russia-gate was real, ignored Joe Biden’s decline, hewed unquestioningly to the establishment line on Covid, and reportedly had at least a dozen reporters covering climate change, all reporting the same deeply flawed story as “settled science.” The death of that sort of journalism is something to celebrate, not mourn.

The information ecosystem is vastly richer and more accessible than ever. There is plenty of misinformation on social media. But it also conveys facts, often supported by real-time video, and instantaneous access to underlying truth. You can read the report, watch the congressional hearing, listen to the cockpit voice recording. It’s all there, in real time. This is the way to hold government accountable.

Ms. Noonan is right to call out the media executives leading Big News for their failure to adjust to the technological realities of the 21st century. But most of them fail because they are incumbents, not new entrants, managers, not entrepreneurs. They lack the vision to imagine a path forward and the incentive to change.

Journalism, like any other craft, is constantly evolving. In every era it has had strengths and weaknesses, virtues and faults. The reality is that every human being sees the world through his own unique lens. Better to live in a world where freedom of expression is ubiquitous than one where the “truth” is told to us by a few ennobled journalists.

Jeff Eisenach

Nonresident senior fellow

American Enterprise Institute" 

State accounts of the triumph of the Chinese Communist Party have whitewashed the atrocities that were central to Mao’s rise to power

See ‘Red Dawn Over China’ Review: A Maoist Mythology by Tunku Varadarajan. He reviewed the book "Red Dawn Over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity" by Frank Dikötter. Excerpts:

"Mr. Dikötter sums up the Maoist fable that traces the triumph in 1949 of the Chinese Communist Party, established in 1921 under the direct tutelage of the Bolsheviks in Moscow: “the country is racked by an unholy alliance of ‘imperialist powers’ and ‘reactionary forces,’ the Communists mobilize the ‘peasants’ by taking the land from the rich and distributing it to the poor, then they gradually unite the people in their fight against the Japanese invader and the fascist Nationalist Party.” In the end, “nobody remains standing except Mao, armed with ideological conviction.” The purity of the party’s mission triumphs, and with the liberation of China comes at last the end of an ugly chapter of Chinese history and of a long series of humiliations.

This storyline follows Mao’s “historical vision,” Mr. Dikötter tells us, and is almost entirely bogus. Mao after 1949 has been thoroughly reassessed by historians and is now regarded as a monster by most right-minded people; but views of early Mao—from 1921 until 1949—remain stubbornly rose-tinted. Mr. Dikötter wants us to think again."

"Mr. Dikötter finds evidence of “how marginal the Communist Party was in the history of China” from its inception until the end of World War II."

"In Wuxi, an industrial city west of Shanghai with 100,000 workers, the party had only 25 members in 1929. In April 1927, the province of Zhejiang (population 20 million) had 2,600 members. In the desperately poor province of Gansu (population 6.7 million) in 1939, the party had a mere 264 adherents." 

"many party branches existed only on paper, and that membership statistics were inflated to claim resources from central authorities (bankrolled by Moscow)"

"Before 1940, only one in 1,700 Chinese (itself likely a faked statistic) was a Communist, roughly equivalent to Communist membership in the U.S."

"the Communists took power . . . but through the violent subjugation of China’s countryside and cities. Mr. Dikötter attributes the bulk of their success to Joseph Stalin, who armed and funded them and, in 1945, sent a million-strong army into Manchuria to help the beleaguered Communists. These Soviet troops stayed until May 1946"

"The methods  . . . were simple: scorch the earth and conquer a cowering, starving population."

"they laid siege to towns, burning government buildings, killing so-called ‘class enemies,’ seizing their property and distributing it to the troops.”"

"It was a takeover by havoc and terror."

"“nowhere during the civil war did anyone ever witness people fleeing a region controlled by the [Nationalist] government towards the Communists.” In fact, all flight was in the opposite direction."

"In every village the Communists took, the first task was to divide villagers into landlords, rich peasants, middle peasants, poor peasants and laborers. The next task: “to turn hardship into hatred,” with the poor dispossessing, beating and killing the notionally rich, whose advantage often amounted to a few more sacks of rice, or rudimentary windows on their house." 

So many students are learning nothing at all and the American educational establishment is at fault

See Can American Children Point to America on a Map? In “The Cradle of Citizenship,” the journalist James Traub finds that the biggest crisis in education is not what kids are learning, but whether they’re learning anything at all by Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia University.

He reviewed the book "THE CRADLE OF CITIZENSHIP: How Schools Can Help Save Our Democracy," by James Traub. Excerpts:

"The real crisis of civics education, Traub discovered, is not that students are learning about 1619 rather than 1776, or the reverse. It is that so many are learning nothing at all. And here he lays responsibility at the feet of the American educational establishment, which has, in the words of one scholar, been turning the “meat of academic subjects into meatloaf.”"

"most public school districts prefer hiring graduates with degrees in education rather than in specific academic subjects like history and physics. This leads to a greater focus on the methods of teaching, expressed in jargon phrases like “inquiry-based learning,” than on acquiring particular knowledge. Traub found a real allergy among public school educators to memorization of vocabulary, chronology and narrative — the elemental material out of which reality-based opinions and arguments can be formed."

"Not all state-funded schools are alike. About a quarter million American children currently attend so-called “classical” schools, many of them charter schools that receive public money but are privately run. In these schools, memorization and recitation are prized, as are classic texts from the Western canon, like Plato’s “Republic” and Milton’s “Paradise Lost.”

Many liberals see red when classical charter schools are mentioned, because of their perceived religious bias and a feeling that such schools drain resources from less advantaged ones. One senses that Traub shared their concerns. But as his book progresses, these schools begin to appear as inspiring examples of more rigorous and civic-minded education for many young Americans.

Outside Dallas, he visits the Founders Classical Academy of Mesquite, a classical charter school with a student body that is nearly all Hispanic. Teachers there make great demands on the students and their parents, which seems only to spur them on. In a ninth grade Western Civilization class, children who had started studying Latin in third grade were reading and intelligently discussing an essay by the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. In a medieval history class at another classical charter school in Phoenix, one girl argued that St. Anselm must have been more popular in his time than Thomas Aquinas since Anselm believed, as Traub writes, “that faith preceded reason." She was in seventh grade.

“It was in classical schools,” Traub observes, “rather than mainstream ones, that I had most often heard the kind of reflective discussion that civic education seeks to foster.” Yes, a large part of the curriculum is devoted to old books. But “if you can speak thoughtfully about ‘The Nicomachean Ethics,’” he remarks, “you can do so about the fairness of our tax system.”"

The Warmth of Cooperation

By Christopher Freiman. 

"New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently caused something of an uproar when he contrasted the “the frigidity of rugged individualism” with the “warmth of collectivism.” This framing echoes the familiar criticism that capitalism forces people to go it alone as “atomistic individuals.” The thought goes like this: markets do real damage to the social fabric and our relationships because they organize our economic lives around competition and self-interest. Organizing our lives around competition encourages people to see each other as rivals rather than partners. In brief, capitalism pits us against each other, while socialism brings us together. Setting aside the fact that collectivist regimes haven’t exactly been warm to those living under them, this view gets capitalism backward.

Start with a simple observation about your own economic life under capitalism. Think about this week: how many cooperative interactions have you had, and how many competitive ones?

You probably didn’t compete with anyone when you bought coffee at Starbucks this morning. You didn’t enter a zero-sum struggle when you paid your phone bill, purchased groceries and gas, or caught a movie. Instead, you took part in a series of mutually beneficial, voluntary transactions. You gave someone money and they gave you something you wanted more than the money. Everyone walked away better off. In the words of Adam Smith, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

Competition, by contrast, rarely pops up in your day-to-day economic life. A business competes with other businesses for customers and you’ve probably competed with others for a job at some point. But you cooperate far more often than you compete. And notice what market competitions really are—they’re competitions to see who’s best at serving others. You might say that they’re competitions to discover the best ways to cooperate and who the best cooperators are (more on this below).

Unsurprisingly, Smith understood the cooperative nature of markets well. He writes that a wool coat 

“is the produce of the joint labour of a great multitude of workmen. The shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the wool-comber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser, with many others, must all join their different arts in order to complete even this homely production. How many merchants and carriers, besides, must have been employed in transporting the materials from some of those workmen to others who often live in a very distant part of the country!  How much commerce and navigation in particular, how many ship-builders, sailors, sail-makers, rope-makers, must have been employed in order to bring together the different drugs made use of by the dyer, which often come from the remotest corners of the world!”

Smith goes on, but I’ve got a word limit here—the point is that markets don’t atomize us. On the contrary, they lead strangers all over the world to cooperate.

Think back to the last time you bought a coffee. Starbucks has to coordinate with bean farmers, shipping companies, truck drivers, warehouse workers, roasters, equipment manufacturers, electricians, plumbers, accountants, and baristas. None of these people know you, and yet they manage, every day, to cooperate in ways that reliably get caffeine in your hand at 7:43 a.m. And this isn’t accidental—the prices provided by markets give people the information they need to figure out what others want, and they provide the incentive to give it to them.

There’s no denying that markets involve competition. You can go to the business section of a bookstore and find titles like Business Warfare and The Warfare of Business. But businesses are competing with each other to see who can best serve consumers. Netflix beat Blockbuster by figuring out a better way to give viewers what they wanted: convenience, selection, no late fees, and eventually streaming. In brief, Netflix won because consumers preferred cooperating with Netflix over Blockbuster. 

A similar point applies to competition in the job market. Maybe you don’t merely want to buy coffee from Starbucks, you want to work there, too. But this means you’ll have to compete with other applicants who also want the job. Here again, let’s look at what it takes for an applicant to win this competition. They need to demonstrate that they’ll do the best job of making customers better off—say, by being more punctual, more efficient at making mochas, or more likely to serve drinks with a smile. Market competition is competition to see who can cooperate most effectively with others.

In any case, democratic socialists can’t be opposed to all competition. After all, democracy requires competition, and democratic socialists want democracy in the workplace as well as in politics. If competing for dollars is frigid, it’s hard to see why competing for votes would be any warmer. Market competition enables millions of people with different values, plans, and priorities to work together without agreeing on much of anything by helping them to coordinate many different choices. You and your barista don’t need to agree on the principles of justice to cooperate and make each other better off. Far from being atomizing or frigid, the free market is a system of interdependence that brings strangers together to cooperate for their mutual benefit."

Steven Pinker on the disaster of communism

From Twitter.

"I spoke with @LaulPatricia about Marxism:

One is: What’s remarkable is that Marxism has been tried. Now, of course, defenders of Marxism say it hasn’t really been tried anywhere, but certainly the people who implemented it claimed they were implementing Marxism. 

And this is a massive experiment—a global experiment—with a very clear outcome. Namely, the Soviet Union was a disaster. The imposition of communism on Eastern Europe was a disaster. The imposition of communism in Venezuela was a disaster. The imposition of communism in Maoist China was a disaster. Disaster in terms of both poverty and oppression and genocide and stupid wars. So the world has told us what happens under communism, and it’s a sign of how out of touch intellectuals can be that there are still people who defend it despite the entire world giving a very clear-cut answer.

One more is: would you rather live in North Korea or South Korea? Would you rather live in the old East Germany or West Germany? We have an experimental group and a matched control group in terms of culture, language, and geography, and the answer is crystal clear. So this is a sign of, I think, the pathology of intellectual life—that Marxism can persist.

The other is, you did call attention to one of the appeals of Marxism, though, and more generally of heavy, strong influence of government guided by intellectuals, which is that there are certain kinds of reforms that you can state as principles. You can articulate them verbally as propositions—like equality, human rights, democracy—but there’s other kinds of progress that take place in massive distributed networks of millions of people, none of whom implements some policy. But collectively, there is an order, an organization that’s beneficial.

So that can happen organically through, for example, the development of a language. No one designed the English language. It’s just hundreds of millions of English speakers. They coin new words. They forget old words. They try to make themselves clear. And we get the English language and the other 5,000 languages spoken on earth.

Likewise, a market economy is something where knowledge is distributed. You don’t have a central planner deciding how many shoes of size 8 will be needed in a particular city, but rather information is conveyed by prices, which are adjusted according to supply and demand. And you’ve got a distributed network of exchange of information that can result in an emergent benefit.

Now, intellectuals tend to hate that. They like rules of language—of correct grammar. They like top-down economic planning. They like cultural change that satisfies particular ideals described by intellectuals. And so rival sources of organization, like commerce, like culture—traditional culture—tend to be downplayed by intellectuals.

And this can be magnified by the fact that many dictatorships give a privileged role to intellectuals, which may be why, over the course of the 20th century, and probably continuing to the present, there has not been a dictator that has not had fans among intellectuals—including the mullahs and ayatollahs of Iran, but also the communist dictators: Mao and Castro, even Stalin in his day. And every other dictator has had, actually, often fawning praise from Western intellectuals."