Recent Viewpoints

Penna Dexter State of the Union addresses remind me of how often governments get involved in matters that, in a market economy, are not their business. It’s a big country. We have companies and professionals to assess and meet people’s individual needs. Government is too big and remote for that. Case in point. In President Biden’s address last week, he touted, among other things, an anti-Covid initiative called “Test to Treat.” The idea is that people would get tested for…

Kerby Anderson Jeffrey Tucker reminds us in an essay that talking about economic warfare last year would be quickly labeled a conspiracy theory. Events in Canada changed that. One crowdfunding platform raised $9 million but then was shut down. Another platform also raised millions until it was hit with denial-of-service attacks and hacked. Then the Canadian Broadcasting Service decided to follow up with donors, which became a ploy for critics to doxx and threaten anyone who donated to the cause….

Kerby Anderson Over the last 15 years of doing this commentary, I occasionally use the famous quote from G. K. Chesterton; “Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.” A corollary might be don’t defund a program or institution merely because you haven’t used it in some time. We live in a dangerous world. But it is easy to forget that if you live in a safe neighborhood and haven’t seen a war break…

Kerby Anderson Ask a politician or government official a serious question, and you are likely to get deflection that includes changing the subject. Sometimes you get what commentators describe as a “word salad.” That’s what NBC News anchor Lester Holt received from President Biden when he asked about inflation. The conversation wandered off to something about computer chips and supply chains. The latest polls show that Americans believe inflation to be the most urgent issue. But you wouldn’t think the…

Kerby Anderson Is the idea of “The Great Reset” merely a conspiracy theory? That seems unlikely given the fact that if you type in those three words in a search engine, you will find more than 900 million hits. Last year the founder of the World Economic Forum co-authored and published a book called COVID-19: The Great Reset. The authors see the current situation in the world as a means of dealing with the “weaknesses of capitalism” supposedly exposed during…

Kerby Anderson Recently I was on a program in which the host was videotaping my comments about these emerging technologies. We talked about bitcoin, blockchains, and NFTs. Then the conversation turned to the Metaverse. As you may know Mark Zuckerberg believes this will become Web 3.0 and has already invested more than $10 billion in its development. People and companies are already investing in this virtual world. They are 21st century colonists exploring and even buying virtual land. They are…

Penna Dexter Like many of the Canadian truckers, author Abigail Shrier never set out to make anyone angry and certainly not to become the center of controversy. To do that, she told an audience of Princeton undergrads recently, “You need only be two things: effective and unwilling to back down.” Ms. Shrier’s bio includes Jewish day school, Columbia University, a fellowship for graduate study at Oxford, and a law degree from Yale. Then came a job at a law firm,…

Kerby Anderson Not so long ago, authoritarian leaders who wanted to extend their power and reduce the freedom of their citizens had to resort to force. State police were directed to round up political opponents and put them in jail or make them disappear. Brownshirts or party members were sent into protests to break them up. But our new digital world has shown political leaders there is a different way to force their will on the citizens. We have seen…

Kerby Anderson Let me introduce you to a word that is probably new to you but will probably be used much more in the future. Decades ago, when I talked about concepts like “secular humanism” or the “New Age Movement” on radio, I think most listeners wondered why I was talking about such philosophical concepts. But they soon learned how important they were. The word is “panopticon.” It is used in two YouTube videos I’ve seen and is used many…

Kerby Anderson Americans say they hate inflation. But many really like inflation, or at least like the impact inflation has on their home values and other assets. We shouldn’t be surprised at this ambivalence. When house prices rise, homeowners are encouraged and will even pat themselves on the back for making such a good investment. Rising home prices make them feel richer (even if the increase is due more to the money printing of the federal government). At the same…

Kerby Anderson We still don’t know the origin of the virus that has infected hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Two years ago, the consensus was that it was a zoonotic virus that jumped from an animal species to humans, or perhaps jumped through an intermediary at the wet market in Wuhan, China. There were a few reasons then, and many reasons now to doubt that scenario. There was only one laboratory in China able to handle such coronaviruses, and…