“If you burn someone else’s flag without permission, that’s theft and destruction of property. If you burn a flag you own, well, you own it and you’re entitled by right to do anything with it you darn well please, so long as you don’t damage other people or other people’s property. And by ‘damage other people,’ I don’t mean ‘hurt someone’s feelings.’ According to Trump, ‘[o]ur great American Flag is the most sacred and cherished symbol of the United States of America, and of American freedom.’ Whether something is ‘sacred’ is a matter of opinion. Whether you ‘cherish’ the flag, or don’t, is entirely up to you to decide. As for Trump, he routinely — if metaphorically — defecates on everything he claims the flag stands for, then wipes his posterior with it … while also wrapping himself in it.” (08/26/25)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Tim Worstall
“Any one thing — any economic resource, fresh water, human labour, cash, capital itself and so on — can be used for a multitude of different things. At any one time, the market price for that thing is the balance between the supply of it and the value in using it to do — in aggregate — all those multitudinous things. Yes, we can even mutter that perhaps the information doesn’t flow here instantaneously and perfectly efficiently. Nevertheless, in its simplest terms, what something costs reflects the value of whatever uses we can put it to. If we decide that we want to do something new, we need a measure of whether we should or not.” (08/26/25)
“After four years of unnecessarily confrontational foreign policy under President Biden, Americans elected Donald Trump in part for his promise to put America first at home and overseas. He promised a war-weary America that he would start no new wars and would get us out of the existing ones. Eight months into his second Administration it appears his promise remains to be fulfilled, as his approval rating continues to slip.” (08/26/25)
“On a recent podcast, Tucker Carlson praised feudalism as ‘so much better than what we have now’ because a ruler is ‘vested in the prosperity of the people he rules.’ This romantic view of medieval hierarchy ignores a brutal reality: For most people, feudalism meant grinding poverty, disease, and early death. As Gale L. Pooley and I found in our 2022 book Superabundance, society in preindustrial Europe was bifurcated between a small minority of the very rich and the vast majority of the very poor. … The Great Enrichment, a phrase coined by my Cato Institute colleague Deirdre McCloskey, of the past 200 years or so lifted billions from the misery that defined human existence for millennia. It was driven by market economies and limits on the rulers’ arbitrary power, not feudal hierarchy.” (08/26/25)
“President Trump, his cabinet, and those who have profited from his rise seem to revel in public displays of cruelty. Take former Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) head Elon Musk, holding a chainsaw at a televised event to celebrate the firing of civil servants. Or Trump’s White House sharing a video featuring Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers marching handcuffed immigrants onto a deportation flight, with Jess Glynne’s musical hit ‘Hold My Hand’ playing in the background. Or how about ICE allowing right-wing TV host Dr. Phil to film its sweeping immigration raids for public consumption? And don’t forget those federal agents tackling California Senator Alex Padilla to the floor (and handcuffing him!) when he asked a question at a Department of Homeland Security press conference.” (08/26/25)
“Stepping out of Potosí’s new bus terminal—gateway to one of the world’s highest cities and, once, one of the richest in the Spanish Empire — I was met not with crisp mountain air but with a gritty breeze thick with diesel. Black exhaust curled from the engines of buses and trufis, their motors straining up Andean slopes at over 4,000 metres. … Two bolivianos bought me a seat …. In the rear-view mirror another trufi shadowed us, belching soot into the thin air — a convoy of combustion. Even with my nose covered, the stench clung. The haze has a cause. In 2005 Bolivia introduced sweeping hydrocarbon subsidies, halving diesel and petrol prices. Nearly two decades on, these subsidies have metastasised into a fiscal burden.” (08/26/25)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Wanjiru Njoya
“History does not always conform to what the dominant scholarly theories of court historians may lead us to expect. In his essay ‘The Task of the Modern Historian,’ Thomas Babington Macaulay observes that historians may formulate valid theories of what they would logically expect to have happened in a particular era, but unfortunately their theories soon displace any interest in the truth about what did in fact happen. They have been ‘seduced from truth, not by their imagination, but by their reason.’ In today’s context, the dominant narratives explain history by reference to theories of race relations. Historical explanations which do not fit comfortably within these theories are treated with skepticism or dismissed as false.” (08/26/25)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“Whenever I see someone going out of their way to denounce the Palestinian resistance while expressing some vaguely pro-Palestine sentiment, I take it as an admission that they aren’t capable of basic human empathy. They look at October 7, think ‘I can’t imagine myself doing that,’ and conclude from this that the perpetrators of October 7 must be worse people than they are. They stop their examination there. They never ask themselves what it would have been like to live the life of a young man who ended up joining Hamas. They never ask themselves what it would have been like to live one’s entire life in a giant concentration camp under the thumb [of] a genocidal apartheid state which routinely murders and abuses your countrymen.” [editor’s note: The people Johnstone refers to are as much victims of Hamas as of the Israeli regime — and were trying to overthrow Hamas leading up to October 7 – TLK] (08/26/25)
“He might be the most well-read person I know. He’s a scholar who has studied authoritarianism for decades, but he’s also an activist who has provided aid and support for dissident movements fighting authoritarian governments dating back to the Cold War — at times at some risk to himself. Because of that work, he’s seen the abuses of authoritarian states firsthand. So he’s been scornful over the years when Americans have hyperbolically likened their political opponents to Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pinochet, or some other totalitarian figure. I suspect that once you’ve seen real authoritarianism on the ground, that sort of posturing probably seems insulting. In other words, I’ve always found him to be a sober realist about these things. So at the conference I asked him straight up, on a scale of one to ten, how worried he is about what’s happening in the U.S. right now.” (08/26/25)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Laurence M Vance
“Welfare is the common term for government relief and assistance programs for low-income Americans, although the word itself has largely been displaced from government documents. The two terms generally in vogue now are income security and entitlement programs. These are programs that provide benefits to any American citizen who qualifies. The programs are open-ended. Instead of spending levels being set every year by congressional appropriation bills, the federal government must spend as much money as necessary to provide benefits to everyone who qualifies for them. … These programs are just as much welfare programs as any of the means-tested welfare programs and should be called as such, for welfare by any other name is still welfare.” (08/26/25)
