Recent Viewpoints

Kerby Anderson Earlier this month the Federal Reserve reported that credit card debt for Americans hit $870 billion as of December. That makes it the largest amount ever. Obviously, credit card debt goes up in December because of shopping for Christmas, but this number is way above the credit card debt load in the past. Nearly 480 million credit cards are in circulation, which is up 100 million from a decade ago during the recession. Using credit cards to purchase…

Kerby Anderson Last week I went to my doctor for a check-up and took my family out to dinner. My experience as a consumer was very different between the two. The restaurant had total transparency. The menu not only had the prices of the items but pictures of most of them. We knew exactly what we were getting and how much it would all cost. I even mentally calculated the tip before I received the bill. At the doctor’s office,…

Kerby Anderson In a recent column, David French reminds us that not so long ago, “religious liberty lawyers were a quirky, somewhat cool, and tiny subset of the legal profession.” They were defending the rights of home-school families and the religious rights of Native American Indians. You could fit the “entire religious–liberty bar in a single mid-sized hotel conference room.” That is no longer true today. He calls these conservative religious-liberties lawyers the “virtual Seal Team Six of the culture…

Kerby Anderson In a previous set of commentaries, I talked about the interview Nick Pitts and I did with Jonathan Haidt on his book, The Coddling of the American Mind. Then I saw an essay that quoted his earlier book, The Righteous Mind, where he talked about “the conservative advantage.” As a liberal, he wrote the book because he “was convinced that American liberals did not get the morals and motives of their conservative countrymen.” In one study he did…

Kerby Anderson The political justification for more government intervention into America’s health care system is the claim that health care is a right. Proponents of the Affordable Care Act in the past made this claim. Current members of Congress pushing the Medicare for All Act also make the claim that health care is a right. Let me start by saying that health care is not a right, at least as properly understood. But even if you accept that it is…

Kerby Anderson For the last few decades, we have been scolded by everyone from radical environmentalists to simple back-to-nature advocates that we have an overly industrialized society. It must be dismantled. We need to adopt the ways of the past. I thought about this when reading a commentary by Jeffrey Tucker. He was watching a video by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who was trying to explain why the earth is headed for an ecological disaster and why we probably shouldn’t be having…

Kerby Anderson Is it possible that sometime in the future, the US Senate will end the filibuster? When he was a Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid ended the filibuster for judicial nominees. That was done to help President Obama get nominees through Senate confirmation. Now it is helping President Trump with his nominees. David French is concerned that Democrats might want to end the filibuster in the future, and that “could break American politics.” He raises this question because of…

Kerby Anderson Venezuela is a total economic and humanitarian disaster. Inflation is rampant. The inflation rate has already exceeded two million percent. All supplies (including toilet paper) are in short supply. Medicine is unavailable in most of the country. Food shortages along with the crumbling economy have forced people to change their eating habits. All are losing weight and battling malnutrition in what has become known as the “Maduro diet.” President Nicolás Maduro is the one of the reasons for…

Penna Dexter Tennis great, Martina Navratilova is speaking out bluntly against the trend in which athletes who are born male but identify as female are increasingly allowed to compete in women’s sports. Navratilova is a lesbian and has promoted women’s professional sports and LGBT causes for decades. Now, for speaking the truth, she’s in hot water with her tribe. In a recent op-ed published in the Sunday Times of London, she wrote: “To put the argument at its most basic:…

Kerby Anderson Not only is the US government in debt, but many of its citizens are in significant debt as well. Economists announced that credit card debt for Americans has now reached a new height of $1.02 trillion. Matt Schultz is a senior industry analyst at CreditCards.com. He says, “This record should serve as a wake-up call to Americans to focus on their credit card debt.” He adds, “Even if you feel your debt is manageable right now, know that…

Kerby Anderson When the US debt officially reached $20 trillion, some listeners asked who owns this debt. In the past, we were assured that the national debt wasn’t a big deal since “we owe it to ourselves.” I never thought that comment was very reassuring then. It simply isn’t true now. The US borrows heavily from foreign countries, especially the Chinese. And this creates the first problem: foreign influence. One former member of Congress put it this way: “whoever pays…