Author: Kerby Anderson

Kerby Anderson
Today is Labor Day. Although this day was set aside to honor trade and labor organizations, I believe it is a day when Christians can also consider how they view work and labor. The Bible has quite a bit to say about how we are to view work, and so I devote part of a chapter in my book, Making the Most of Your Money, to a biblical view of work.
First, we are to work unto the Lord in our labors. Colossians 3:23 says, “Whatever you do, do your work heartily, as for the Lord rather than for men.” We may have an earthly master (or boss) but ultimately, we are working for our heavenly Master.
Second, work is valuable. Paul says in 1 Thessalonians 4:11-12 to “Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life and attend to your own business and work with your hands, just as we commanded you, so that you will behave properly toward outsiders and not be in any need.” He also warns in 2 Thessalonians 3:10 that “if anyone is not willing to work, then he is not to eat, either.”
The Proverbs talk about the importance and benefits of work. Proverbs 12:11 says, “He who tills his land will have plenty of bread, but he who pursues worthless things lacks sense.” Proverbs 13:4 says, “The soul of the sluggard craves and gets nothing, but the soul of the diligent is made fat.” And Proverbs 14:23 says, “In all labor there is profit, but mere talk leads only to poverty.”
The Greeks and Romans looked upon manual work as a menial task that was only for slaves (or else for people of lower classes). The biblical view of work changed that ancient view because work and labor were combined with the idea of vocation and calling.
These ideas were reinforced in the Middle Ages through the gild movement and even expanded during the Reformation. Martin Luther, for example, taught that all work can be done for the glory of God. John Calvin taught that all should work because they were to serve as God’s instruments on earth. This led to what today is called the Protestant work ethic.
Let’s use this Labor Day to teach and reinforce biblical ideas of work.

Kerby Anderson
Are more Americans becoming unemployable? In previous commentaries, I have mentioned that we have 7 million men (ages 25-54) who are not working and not looking for work. Last year to coincide with Labor Day, Senator Marco Rubio issued a critical report on the working and non-working man. His research discovered that two-thirds of these non-working men “have never married” and nearly “a third live with their parents.” Also, half of them take painkillers daily.
Steven Malanga concludes in his essay, Unemployable, that “a growing number of Americans aren’t simply out of a job. They’re no longer fit for work.” This is due, he explains, to worsening social dysfunction, changing attitudes toward work, and failures by the schools to prepare students for the labor market.
This problem could not come at a worse time. This surge in unemployable Americans is taking place as millions of baby boomers are retiring. Some of the impact has been cushioned by the steady rise of women entering the workforce, but that percentage reached its peak years ago.
One major reason more Americans are unemployable is drugs. The lockdowns during the pandemic detached people from work but also increased the percent of Americans using drugs. Quest Diagnostics reported that workers testing positive for drugs hit a ten-year high in 2021.
Two dozen states have legalized recreational marijuana. As I have mentioned in previous commentaries, workers regularly using cannabis are not only hazardous to themselves but to others. Many positions go unfilled because companies cannot find workers who do not test positive for drugs.
Drugs are just one reason more and more Americans are now unemployable. I will talk about other reasons in future commentaries.

Kerby Anderson
James Lindsay knows what the next big woke trend will be because he knows how the Left thinks. He calls it Critical Immigration Theory, which is not to be confused with Critical Race Theory. He says that critical theory is so flexible that you can stick any word between critical and theory and you have a new way of seeing the world.
For example, Critical Colonial Theory argues that colonial exploitation by Europeans allowed them to get rich by taking advantage of weaker countries in other parts of the world. When critical theory is applied to mass illegal immigration, it uses a human rights perspective by talking about having compassion for the poor and oppressed people of the world. He warns that what it is really about is targeting national citizenship and national sovereignty using mass illegal immigration as a wedge.
He observes we’re already hearing some of the language from the mainstream media. The descriptions have “migrated from illegal aliens to illegal immigrants to undocumented migrants to just migrants.” He predicts what comes next will be no adjective at all. “In other words, people who enter the United States illegally are just as American as any American citizen.”
He then provides several examples illustrating his prediction. Then he concludes by explaining that the goal isn’t merely to water down the idea of national citizenship. The real goal is to eliminate it. Instead, we will be hearing about “global citizenship” that “allows migration from anywhere to anywhere as a human right. This will be a world where borders are just meaningless lines on a map.”
We need to be ready for the next political trend based upon the plight of migrants and illegal immigration.

Kerby Anderson
This month of August is the 53rd anniversary of our government going off the gold standard. Saifedean Ammous wrote his book The Fiat Standard to explain the impact that political and economic decision has had on our lives.
His earlier book, The Bitcoin Standard, was a bestselling book that has been translated into more than two dozen languages. He argues that by first understanding the operation of bitcoin, someone can then better understand the equivalent operations in fiat. “It is easier to explain an abacus to a computer user than it is to explain a computer to an abacus user.”
Why the complexity? The reason is simple. The fiat system (we use today) was not a carefully constructed economic system. It was not a deliberately designed operating system like bitcoin. Rather, it “evolved through a complex process of compromise between political constraints and expedience in managing government default.”
He explains that fiat currency affects what economists describe as time preference. A person with high time preference focuses on present needs, while a person with low time preference is willing to delay present gratification and places more emphasis on future needs.
When the world was on the gold standard, people knew that money would hold its value in the future. This enticed people to save. But when the countries moved to fiat currency, the value of the currency declined and there is less inclination to save.
His book describes how the “fiat standard” has affected such diverse items as fiat food, fiat science, fiat fuels, and fiat states. He also explains why the quality of the buildings we construct and the goods we buy are declining. That is also why our dollars are worth less.

Kerby Anderson
Yesterday, I talked about why price controls are a bad idea, and I thought I might continue by looking at two policies being proposed to attract young voters: student loan debt and housing prices.
Let’s start with a simple statement about supply and demand. If you want to lower prices, you need to increase supply and/or decrease demand. Unfortunately, colleges aren’t governed by a free market of supply and demand. That is why the cost of tuition has risen twice the rate of inflation over the last few decades.
Demand for higher education might be going down due to one surprising demographic fact. Fewer children were born during the Great Recession years of 2008 to 2011. There will be a 15 percent decrease of potential students.
However, colleges won’t reduce their costs because both the federal government and state governments are giving students and their parents scholarships and loans. And President Biden has been cancelling billions of dollars in student loan debt, essentially signaling that students won’t have to pay back the loans they are taking out this year.
The principle of supply and demand also works in housing. When there aren’t many houses for sale, the price goes up. President Biden has called for building 2 million housing units, and Vice-President Kamala Harris has now called for building 3 million units.
To achieve this, the Harris campaign talks about offering expanded tax credit to home builders. The campaign, however, also proposes a $25,000 subsidy for first-time homebuyers. This would increase demand and not bring home prices down.
Giving money to students and giving money to home buyers seems like a good idea until you get back to basic economics. Understanding supply and demand is necessary to evaluate campaign promises.

Kerby Anderson
You only get one chance to make a good first impression. Americans were trying to get a first impression of Kamala Harris before the Democratic National Convention. Yes, they knew something about her as vice-president, but now she was running for president.
Her first decision about personnel for her future administration was to pick Governor Tim Walz as her vice-presidential running mate. He was one of the most liberal governors or senators she could have picked.
Her first policy statement was a speech on price gouging given the Friday before the convention. Her solution was price controls. The headline of a Washington Post op-ed was: “When your opponent calls you ‘communist,’ maybe don’t propose price controls.” On radio, I suggested she might want to give her speech in the original Russian.
Price controls were a failure in the Soviet Union, in Venezuela, and even in the US when President Richard Nixon tried it decades ago. Giving more “authority” to the Federal Trade Commission to punish grocery companies who charge too much won’t solve the problem of high prices. I suspect the speech was more about trying to placate the base and appeal to swing voters by showing she “cares about people.”
Price controls won’t happen, but this is a teachable moment. Why are price controls a bad idea? First, they distort the market. The aforementioned op-ed explained it “would lead to shortages, black markets, and hoarding, among other distortions.” Second, it is hard to find price gouging as the problem. Last year, profit-margins in the grocery industry were at a low of 1.6 percent.
Kamala Harris was trying to remove one of her liabilities before she sat down for interviews. Inflation is a problem, but price controls aren’t the solution.

Kerby Anderson
At a conference last month, two presidential candidates talked about establishing a strategic reserve for America’s finances. Both Donald Trump and Robert Kennedy, Jr. spoke to a bitcoin conference and called for the establishment of a “Bitcoin Strategic Reserve.” In addition, Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) explained her Bitcoin Reserve legislation to the audience that also included other members of Congress and CEOs of companies and billionaire investors.
Not so long ago, conversations about bitcoin were taking place in the periphery of society. No longer. Two presidential candidates spoke at the conference, and even the presidential campaign for Kamala Harris has been talking about cryptocurrency. Consider just a few of the comments by the two candidates.
Kennedy referred to a Bitcoin Strategic Reserve as “corruptions’ greatest foe.” He also said bitcoin is “anti-war.” Trump promised to make America a nation that leads in bitcoin. He also called for an end to “Operation Chokepoint 2.0” and for an end to the development of a CBDC.
One of the other speakers, Michael Saylor (Former CEO of MicroStrategy), refers to this idea as the Louisiana Purchase of our generation. He reminds people that, “Thomas Jefferson purchased the Louisiana Territory for $15 million in 1803 and nearly doubled the size of the United States. William Seward paid $7 million for Alaska that has a trillion dollars of oil underneath it.”
Will a strategic reserve be implemented in the next few years? It deserves attention and should be debated in Congress after the November election.

Kerby Anderson
Revenge porn and the publishing of deep fake abuse are a growing problem on social media. That is why US senators from both parties have sponsored a bill known as the Take It Down Act. It would criminalize the publication of non-consensual intimate image abuse and require social media platforms to remove such items immediately.
On my radio program, we have been encouraging listeners to contact their two senators about the legislation. Recently, I had the bill’s author, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), on my program to explain why such legislation was necessary. “In recent years, we’ve witnessed a stunning increase in exploitative sexual material online, largely due to bad actors taking advantage of newer technologies like generative artificial intelligence. Many women and girls are forever harmed by these crimes, having to live with being victimized again and again.”
Democratic Senator Jacky Rosen (D-NV) further explained, “As artificial intelligence continues to grow and become more prevalent in daily life, we must prevent it from being used to produce non-consensual intimate images.”
Republican Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) acknowledges the benefits and dangers of AI: “Artificial intelligence is the future and provides an infinite number of possibilities of how this new technology can be used to improve lives around not only in this country, but across the entire globe. With any new industry comes the need to ensure it is not being used by bad actors, and AI is no different.”
We need this bipartisan legislation to deal with this growing problem on social media.

Kerby Anderson
A few weeks ago, Donald Trump argued that we are closer to World War III than we have been in decades. Is that merely campaign hyperbole or an honest assessment of reality? Global conflicts seem inevitable no matter who is elected president.
The Commission on the National Defense Strategy just issued a 114-page report. The commission was created by Congress in 2022 and began its deliberations in April 2023. It is co-chaired by former Democrat congresswoman Jane Harmon, and by Eric Edelman, a top Pentagon official during George W. Bush administration. Here are a few of its conclusions:
“The threats the United States faces are the most serious and most challenging the nation has encountered since 1945 and include the potential for near-term major war.”
“China and Russia are major powers that seek to undermine U.S. influence… China is outpacing the United States and has largely negated the U.S. military advantage in the Western Pacific through two decades of focused military investment.”
“China and Russia’s ‘no-limits’ partnership, formed in February 2022 just days before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has only deepened and broadened to include a military and economic partnership with Iran and North Korea, each of which presents its own significant threat to U.S. interests. This new alignment of nations opposed to U.S. interests creates a real risk, if not likelihood, that conflict anywhere could become a multi-theater or global war.”
This report is a reminder that we live in a dangerous world and that a global war is possible. Who we select as the next Commander in Chief will face some significant challenges.

Kerby Anderson
Three months ago, I wrote about the disconnect between the mainstream media and American citizens concerning crime statistics. The media says that crime is decreasing. According to the latest Gallup survey on the subject, nearly all (92%) Republicans and a majority (58%) of Democrats thought crime was increasing.
The disconnect now seems to be between members of the Biden administration and the public. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg went on television to argue: “If you look this up at home, you will know that crime went down under Biden and crime went up under Trump. Why would America want to go back to the higher crime we experienced under Donald Trump?”
As I explained back in my previous commentary, if you decide to defund the police, arrest rates will go down and people will be less inclined to report crime.
Professor John Lott writes about “The Truth About the Crime Explosion.” The American people can see that crime is increasing, he says, when they go into a CVS or Walgreens and find many of the products behind glass. Not only is property crime increasing, but so is violent crime.
He explains that crime is reported in two ways. The first is through the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System, which only counts crime reported to police. The other is the National Crime Victimization Survey that asks about 240,000 people each year whether they have been victims of crime. Those numbers are much higher.
If there are fewer police on the street, there will be fewer arrests. And if people think criminals won’t be caught and punished, they are less likely to report a crime to the police. And some DAs have been downgrading felonies to misdemeanors.
There is a crime explosion even if the media and the administration refuse to admit it.

Kerby Anderson
This week is the Democratic Convention, and more Americans will be paying attention to the upcoming elections. The Olympics are over, and that means that many will be tuning in to learn more about the candidates. So far, the press hasn’t been asking many questions of substance or even been allowed to ask many questions. Here are three principles for you that all start with the letter P.
The first P is personality. In an ideal world, we would love to have a governor or a member of Congress or a president who is warm, humble, and likeable. Some are, but most aren’t. Ambitious and driven people are the people most likely to win elective office.
That is why we need to focus on the second P that is policy. What policies will this candidate promote and implement? This is what will ultimately affect your family, your church, and society. Fortunately, there are voter guides and party platforms you can and should consult.
Yes, political platforms often have vague language and platitudes. But there are also dozens and dozens of specific policy recommendations. Does the candidate agree with those policies? If not, why not? In the case of the presidential candidates, both campaigns this year have been quite involved in crafting the party platforms.
A third P is personnel. If you are voting for a candidate in an executive position, you should also evaluate who they will appoint to help them achieve their agenda. The president, for example, can appoint 3,000-5,000 personnel in the executive branch. Each of the presidential candidates has picked a vice-presidential running mate. Who he or she picks provides a window to the type of person who will be in their administration. As the adage goes, personnel are policy.
Although there is lots of talk about personalities right now, policy and personnel are more important in choosing a candidate.

Kerby Anderson
Professor Paul Kengor argues that “You Can Never Have Enough Kids.” He was on my radio program last week to talk about his article.
He confronts what he calls the mindless cliché of our culture: Wait until you have enough money to have kids. He hears it regurgitated by young couples all the time. He then takes the time to calmly ask them a few questions.
“How many kids did your grandparents have? How about your great-grandparents when they came to America dirt poor on packed ships headed to Ellis Island?” When they acknowledge that those ancestors had a bunch of kids, he then asks them: “How much money did they have?”
He has found that the young man or woman is usually taken aback. They haven’t heard that from the culture. They know their ancestors had no money but raised large, intact families and stayed married. In fact, they wouldn’t be alive today without those ancestors bestowing the gifts of life.
He also asks a follow-up question: “How much money will be enough before having that kid? How much cash should be shoveled into this child’s materialistically ideal existence?” People who focus on having enough money will find they will never have enough.
On the radio program, Paul Kengor also reminded us that the greatest gift you can give your child is a sibling. When people find out how many kids his wife and he have, they say, “One kid has been hard enough for us!” His response is that one kid is harder, but two kids are easier. The one child gets a playmate other than you. He explained that when he had only one child, he had to come home and play Legos for several hours. When the second boy came along, he had boundless energy and was all in.
We need messages like this in a culture that doesn’t seem to value children anymore.

Kerby Anderson
We have another example of the growing surveillance state. This comes from the revelation that the Securities and Exchange Commission is completing a database of all Americans’ stock and equity transactions and portfolios. It will track investments in real time.
Some experts have expressed concerns. Former US Attorney General Bill Barr says the database presents a “huge concern.” In a recent interview, Barr explained, “you could have someone at the SEC say, ‘Let me check out this person and see if I can find something on them.’” He argued that this database of all American’s stock and equity transaction information would allow SEC employees to go on “fishing expeditions.”
This may be the first you have heard of this. Fortunately, former vice president Mike Pence’s organization, Advancing American Freedom (AAF), is attempting to raise awareness.
How do we lose our privacy? We lose it bit by bit, always with the justification that it is being done for our own good. In my booklet on “Digital Surveillance,” I document how both big government and big business are collecting massive amounts of data on us and how it can be used against us.
More than a decade ago, the SEC decided to build a giant database to capture trades. Then it just grew and grew. And critics say the SEC avoided congressional scrutiny by putting pressure on self-regulating organizations.
A few members of Congress and a coalition of conservative policy experts signed a letter expressing concern about the project. They predict the database upon completion “would be the world’s largest database outside of the National Security Agency.”
This is how government grows and how we lose our privacy.

Kerby Anderson
When I talk about the US national debt, often someone asks: Why can’t we just cancel the debt? People do this with bankruptcy. Why can’t the government do the same?
The US currently has a $35 trillion national debt plus $217 trillion in unfunded liabilities. Government debt is issued by the US Treasury, through what are called US Treasuries. When you purchase a T-bill, it shows up in your bank account or brokerage account as an asset. The US owes $6 trillion in T-bills, $14 trillion in T-notes, and $4.5 trillion in T-bonds.
Why not just cancel all debt? Debt is a liability that the US government owes someone. Your elderly parents or grandparents probably own some T-bills. This government debt is an asset for them.
If you cancel all the US government debt, then those T-bills would be worthless. They can’t buy groceries or pay for utilities or medical care. Cancelling US Government debt would instantly impoverish millions of Americans, most of whom are retired.
These treasuries also may be sitting on the balance sheet of an insurance company that will need the money to pay out future claims. They are also sitting on the balance sheet of other countries. For example, Japan has $1.1 trillion, and China has $768 billion.
Even if we could cancel the debt, it would have no impact on this country’s unfunded liabilities. These are future promises that will need to be paid out and will eventually convert into debt and be held on the US government’s balance sheet. That is additional debt dumped on future generations.
This is why we cannot cancel the US debt.

Kerby Anderson
One of the attacks on the Trump campaign is to whip up voter fears about Project 2025. Kamala Harris said this on the campaign trail: “I will do everything in my power to unite the Democratic Party–and unite our nation–to defeat Donald Trump and his extreme Project 2025 agenda.” Her campaign website claims that Project 2025 will “strip away our freedoms” and “abolish checks and balances.”
Project 2025 is a 922-page document created through the Heritage Foundation by 400 experts. It is essentially a conservative wish list of policy initiatives these experts would like implemented. When asked about it, Donald Trump said he had not read it and it doesn’t represent his policy goals.
More recently, the leader of the project (Paul Dans) stepped down from the project. One of the Trump campaign advisors applauded the action and proclaimed: “Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed.”
Although the document touches on just about every aspect of the federal government, it appears that the greatest concern from Kamala Harris and other Democrats is the section on how to rein in the administrative state. Although a Trump administration would like to reform the civil service system so it would be easier to remove some governmental workers, I think it unlikely any meaningful reform will occur. I think American voters should welcome more accountability from unelected bureaucrats, but few in Congress seem ready for such reform.
Another attack on Project 2025 is the fallacious argument that it would radically change Social Security. Donald Trump has made it clear he has no desire to reform Social Security or any other entitlement.
Scaring people about Project 2025 may be an effective campaign strategy, but it isn’t based on reality.

Kerby Anderson
As you may have heard, President Biden wants to change the Supreme Court. This latest desperate attempt at “court packing” will not succeed, but it’s worth discussing as a teachable moment. In his op-ed, the president proclaimed, “I am calling for three bold reforms to restore trust and accountability to the court and our democracy.” One of his proposals is 18-year term limits for justices.
The Founding Fathers gave Supreme Court justices lifetime tenure while serving with good behavior. They did so to assure justices had independence from political whims. Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist Paper #78 that “This independence of the judges is equally requisite to guard the Constitution and the rights of individuals” and would protect them from “serious oppressions of the minor party.”
Kelly Shackelford (First Liberty Institute) quotes Joe Biden, who in 1983 said that court packing “was a bonehead idea. It was a terrible, terrible mistake to make. And it put in question, for an entire decade, the independence of the most significant body” which is the Supreme Court. He says Biden was right back in 1983 and wrong today.
His organization had put together a nationwide coalition of nearly a half million patriots who plan to flood Congress and the White House with this critical message: NO to court packing, NO to the liberal agenda, NO to a Supreme Court Coup.
Kristen Waggoner (Alliance Defending Freedom) also warns, “Don’t be fooled. This move by President Biden has nothing to do with protecting the court and has everything to do with the Left’s desire to dominate every institution in society.”
These proposals have little chance of succeeding since they need an amendment to the Constitution. That requires a supermajority of Congress and ratification by three-fourth of the states.
Fortunately, none of these so-called “reforms” will be enacted.

Kerby Anderson
Most Christians do not have a biblical worldview. That has been well documented in numerous studies. This is puzzling since a significant percentage of Christians without a biblical worldview regularly attend church services. A recent study by George Barna may have an answer.
Put simply, church members don’t have a biblical worldview because the pastor does not have a biblical worldview. Less than a third (31%) of pastors in America have a biblical worldview. That is a shocking percentage.
One pastor told George Barna that may not be too shocking considering that many pastors of liberal churches would not have an orthodox view. But he went on to say that what would be shocking is if the percentages were low among evangelical pastors. The most recent poll shows that a bare majority of evangelical pastors (51%) and only about a third (36%) of charismatic or Pentecostal pastors have a biblical worldview. He also found that less than one in ten (9%) of pastors in traditionally black churches have a biblical worldview.
Another interesting correlation was the relationship between worldview and church size. Generally, the smaller congregations are more likely than the larger congregations to have a biblical worldview. More than four in ten (41%-45%) of the pastors of churches with smaller congregations have a biblical worldview. By contrast, only 15 percent of pastors in churches with more than 250 adults have a biblical worldview.
George Barna explained that pastors who fill the position of Teaching Pastor or Executive Pastor usually had the lowest scores. These positions are found most often in larger churches.
His survey breaks down pastors according to denomination, according to church size, and according to congregational ethnicity. None of the percentages are encouraging and are a reminder that we need to be discerning when choosing a church.

Kerby Anderson
Why do we write down our laws? I recently read an article providing a practical reason for writing down the laws of a nation, but I would also like to add one historical reason for why we write down our laws.
This country is supposed to be a nation of laws and not men. We haven’t always lived up to the vision, but that is what we are to aspire to achieve. When you write down a law, you give it a fixed meaning. A government with laws with precise meanings is a government of law not of arbitrary power. You know what rights the government acknowledges, and you know what prohibitions will be punished.
In my booklet A Biblical Point of View on Constitutional Interpretation, I talk about two different views. Originalism attempts to understand the mindset of the framers who constructed it. That is why some have referred to this view as “strict constructionism.” The other view is modernism, also often called “the living Constitution.” It attempts to find meaning for the Constitution today and rejects attempts to view it through the eyes of white men who lived in the 18th century. Ultimately, rights and legal definitions become putty in the hands of judges and justices.
Historically, we write down laws because of the Puritans. They wrote out their covenants because they understood that they were to answer to God for their actions. These covenants bound each person to another person and the whole community as an agreement under God. They also understood that the rights they enjoyed came from God. Ultimately, these Puritan Covenants became a model for the US Constitution.
Americans want to live under a government of law, not a government where justices find principles in the unwritten “penumbras” of a living Constitution. Laws are written down to fix their meanings and protect against judges and justices who want to change the law arbitrarily.

Kerby Anderson
You have probably heard the phrase, “History Does Not Repeat Itself, But It Rhymes.” That observation is true, especially in economics.
Investor Ray Dalio learned that lesson at a young age. In 1971, he was clerking on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. When President Nixon announced that paper currency could no longer be turned in for gold, he expected pandemonium on the floor as stocks took a dive. Instead, the stock market jumped 4 percent as the dollar plummeted. He was surprised because he hadn’t experienced a currency devaluation, but he would have known if he had studied history.
This isn’t the first time the US has had to deal with significant inflation. In fact, the current chairman of the Federal Reserve (Jerome Powell) vows that he won’t make the mistake of Arthur Burns, who was Fed chairman in the 1970s.
I recently read an article from a Yale economics professor who was at the Federal Reserve back in those days. He said Arthur Burns wanted to remove energy-related products from the Consumer Price Index (CPI) because of the Yom Kippur War and the subsequent oil embargo. Blaming oil prices on a war. Does that sound familiar?
Then came surging food prices. Arthur Burns argued that this was traceable to unusual weather (specifically an El Niño event) that affected such things as fertilizers and feedstock prices. He, therefore, wanted to remove food prices from the CPI. Again, doesn’t this sound familiar?
By the time he was done, only about 35 percent of the CPI was left. If you have been listening to my commentaries for any length of time, you know that we no longer measure CPI the way we did decades ago.
This isn’t the first time America has had to deal with significant inflation, and we can learn lessons from economic history about what we should do.

Kerby Anderson
A few decades ago, Americans were increasingly concerned about privacy. Back then, we did several radio programs on the topic but now many of our privacy concerns have faded.
Mark Zuckerberg put this in perspective. He said when he got to his dorm room at Harvard, the question many students asked was, “why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?” He then went on to acknowledge that people (especially his generation) became more comfortable with sharing information online.
In his book, Why Privacy Matters, Neil Richards writes about some of the myths that surround privacy concerns. One myth is that privacy is about hiding dark secrets. We hear the argument that “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.” But that doesn’t mean we should have everyone see everything. We wear clothes out of modesty. We don’t want videos of what we do in a bathroom or bedroom.
Another myth is that privacy isn’t about creepiness. He provides lots of examples of privacy invasions we would not tolerate. Yet we have the famous comment by Google’s Eric Schmidt that I have mentioned in previous commentaries. He explained that: “Google’s policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.”
Another myth is that privacy isn’t primarily about control. We are assured that we can make informed choices about the amount of information a technology company can use. But do you really read all the words in a privacy notice? One famous study from more than a decade ago estimated that if we were to quickly read the privacy policies of every website we encounter, it would take 75 full working days to read them all.
Privacy concerns still exist, and we need to focus on them in the future.