Recent Viewpoints

Kerby Anderson Every few months a city council decides to substantially increase the minimum wage in their city only to have economics provide a reality check. The last time I wrote about this, the focus was on the Seattle, Washington City Council. This time the economic lesson took place on the other side of the country in Portland, Maine. On January 1, the minimum wage in Portland spiked to $19.50 from $13. To put this in perspective, this was five…

Kerby Anderson Many religious leaders from various denominations have spoken out against what could be called “woke theology.” Earlier this month Archbishop José Gomez added his concern. As the leader of the Archdiocese in Los Angeles, he wanted to step forward to educate others. He is concerned that the “space that the Church and believing Christians are permitted to occupy is shrinking” due to wokeism. He has noticed how “Church institutions and Christian-owned businesses are increasingly challenged and harassed.” He…

Kerby Anderson In previous commentaries, I’ve quoted Dennis Prager’s assessment that the left ruins just about every part of society it touches. The latest example comes from an editorial by Derek Hunter of how political correctness is ruining the film industry. The example he cited was the decision by Hollywood to make a movie about the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The producers were able to secure Helen Mirren to play the Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. This was a key…

Kerby Anderson Earlier this month, a news story reported that the University of Memphis was offering professors $3,000 to infuse their courses with diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice. When we talked about this on my radio program, my guests wondered if professors who were already doing this for free might feel slighted. Social justice concepts like critical race theory and “anti-racism” have been injected into college classes for some time. But this announcement brought these ideas out in the…

Kerby Anderson Inflation is a growing problem, and yet our political leaders have very few policy tools they can use to combat it. If you are older, you might remember the inflation of the 1970s, and you might even remember how the Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volker, with the support of President Ronald Reagan, dealt with it. He increased interest rates and reduced the money supply. Unfortunately, those tools can’t be used this time. Rod Thomson writes about the “coming…

Kerby Anderson Earlier this month, a political commentator on CNN came to the realization that having Covid is not a moral failing. He declared that “we unknowingly turned having Covid into some sort of judgment on your character.” His remedy was for us to “recognize that getting Covid isn’t a moral failing! It’s a super infectious disease that you can protect against but can’t guarantee you wo1qwn’t get it.” That declaration was too much for columnist Charles Cooke, who asked:…

Penna Dexter The COVID-19 vaccine was approved for children 5 and older on an emergency basis at the end of October. Immediately, talk of mandates began. Several experts on an FDA advisory panel warned against mandating the shot for kids. But some bureaucrats have already succumbed to what National Review’s Rich Lowry calls “the irresistible urge of officialdom in blue areas toward pandemic coercion.”  Once the FDA fully approves the vaccine for children, mandates in California, Louisiana, and Washington D.C….

Kerby Anderson Lots of controversial ideas are being proposed right now, and I know you probably wonder how to respond to them. Eliminating the Electoral College, regulating campaign speech, and ending the filibuster are just a few. The best way to respond to many of these proposals is to remind Americans that our country is a republic, not a democracy. The framers recognized that the country would be quite diverse. They wanted to create a government that would allow different…

Kerby Anderson Many critics in the current generation are making unfair judgments about past generations with an air of moral superiority. I call it generational judgmentalism. Victor Davis Hanson merely says that these critics are self-important and ungracious and have very little gratitude for those in the past that did so much for all of us. He observes that these “21st-century critics rarely acknowledge their own present affluence and leisure owe much to history’s prior generations whose toil helped create…

Kerby Anderson This country had a crime spike in 2021. The only real question is whether it will continue in 2022. Social commentators remind us that once law and order is lost, it is not easy to restore. How bad was this crime spike? The Uniform Crime Report details a rise in murders of around 29 percent. A dozen US cities set homicide records: Tucson, Arizona; Columbus, Ohio; Toledo, Ohio; Rochester, New York; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Indianapolis, Indiana; Louisville, Kentucky; St….

Kerby Anderson It’s election season, so we are hearing the word gerrymander once again. The term gerrymander comes from the early part of the 19th century. Eldridge Gerry, the governor of Massachusetts, supported legislation that redrew the districts of his party. One district looked like a salamander, so his opponents called it a Gerry-mander. The term stuck and is with us to this day. Democrats have been in full gerrymander panic because they feared that many of the state legislatures,…