In his book, After America, Mark Steyn opened with a scenario of what a man living in the 19th century would think of technological changes in 1950. He would be astonished.

Our time traveler would see a home full of mechanical contraptions. “There is a huge machine in the corner of the kitchen, full of food and keeping the milk fresh and cold. Even more amazingly, there is an orchestra playing somewhere within his very house. No, wait, its coming from a tiny box on the countertop!” A refrigerator, a radio, even the car outside the house would be amazing to him.

Steyn then imagines time traveler flies to the 21st century. He is puzzled because “aside from a few adjustments, everything looks pretty much as it did in 1950.” Oh, there are some differences such as computers. But sadly, most of the remarkable changes took place in the first part of the 20th century.

His argued that technology seemed to plateau during the latter half of the 20th century. We could dream of flying cars, time machines, and teleporting devices, but there are physical limits that prevent them from being created. But another reason for the limit were government and bureaucratic regulations that limited development.

Let me now make a prediction. We will begin to see significant change due to developing technology and Big Tech companies. Yes, we will still have cars in the near future, but they will likely be electric cars and self-driving cars. This last year, we saw remarkable developments in biotech. A vaccine for the pandemic wasn’t developed in ten years or even five years. It was developed in less than one year.

Fifty years ago, Alvin Toffler wrote the book, Future Shock, predicting major trends and changes. We may be at the edge of change we haven’t seen in decades.

Whenever health is involved, trust is also important. You go to the doctor who prescribes a treatment or medicine. You may know something about anatomy and physiology, but you need to trust that your doctor is prescribing the right treatment or pharmaceutical.

Trust is also important when it comes to the health care establishment. Do you trust these health experts who have been making recommendations during this pandemic? Over the last year, some of them haven’t given us lots of reasons to feel confident about their comments.

The question of trust surfaced in a recent radio interview I did about vaccine hesitancy. My guest explained that none of us have expertise in virology nor in the manufacture of mRNA vaccines. Therefore, we have to trust doctors and scientists who know much more about these subjects than we know.

On the other hand, the public health establishment has been making statements that we can check. I mentioned the statements last year by Dr. Anthony Fauci and Surgeon General Jerome Adams who advised the public not to wear masks. I did part of a radio program documenting their efficacy and correctly guessed they merely lied about masks in order to have enough for health care professionals.

A few weeks ago, the public health establishment suspended the Johnson & Johnson vaccine distribution. Six confirmed cases of a blood clot disorder were found out of seven million who already received the vaccine. If this was a one-in-a-million risk, why stop using the vaccine? Or do health authorities know of more cases and are not forthcoming with the evidence? Either way, we should have legitimate questions.

Trust is important in health care decisions, especially when recommendations are being made about masks, lockdowns, and restricting society. Americans have a right to be skeptical.

With all the current emphasis on the environment, you might be tempted to ask, what happened to the Green New Deal? The simple answer is that it’s being implemented under the guise of infrastructure.

Don’t take my word for it. Consider what Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said about the bill before Congress. She laments that “some parts of the party try to avoid saying Green New Deal and really dance around and try not to use the term, ultimately, the framework I think has been adopted.”

Although a small part of the bill deals with what most of us would consider infrastructure, more than half of it is focused on reducing CO2 by eliminating fossil fuels and promoting green investments.

Billions are set aside to build and retrofit homes and businesses with energy efficiency programs like the Weatherization Assistance Program. Economists looking at that program estimate that the initial costs to retrofit all of these buildings will be more than double any possible energy savings.

Perhaps the greatest irony in all of this is who ultimately benefits from these federal expenditures. The green energy credits will enrich corporations and hedge funds already invested in green energy projects. Even Big Oil will benefit since they will receive investment credits for carbon capture and other green energy projects.

The president and other proponents have been hyping the legislation by saying it will create millions of green jobs. But attempts to end any reliance on fossil fuels in the near future will likely destroy many more of the existing jobs in the oil and gas industry.

We seem to be transforming our world into a zero-risk society. That is the conclusion of Andrew Michta, who is the dean of the College of International and Security Studies at the George Marshall European Center for Security Studies.

“A year of the COVID pandemic has transformed some of the freest and most affluent societies in the history of the West beyond recognition and in ways perhaps never imagined.” He’s not the only person aware of the psychosis that has gripped so many people during this last year.

In previous commentaries, I quoted Jonathan Haidt who explains in The Coddling of the American Mind the cult of “safetyism.” Young people have become obsessed with eliminating threats to the point where fragility becomes expected and routine.

Of course, the emphasis on safety only focused on one factor. Michta reminds us that “few politicians or media pundits bothered to ask the obvious question of why a life threatened by COVID deserved to be saved before all other lives threatened by, say, untreated cancers or untreated heart conditions, and why the rights of free citizens, such as the right to earn a living, to interact with one’s family and friends, to educate one’s children, or simply to live in freedom.”

The impact of the pandemic and lockdowns has been devastating. The economic loss of businesses and the nation’s economy, the unraveling of our educational system, and the rise of so many social pathologies (drugs, alcohol, suicide, domestic violence) are just a few of the consequences we currently face and will experience for many years to come.

If we are to move forward, we must accept the fact that we will never eliminate risk in this fallen world. The best we can hope for is to mitigate risks. And hope that our leaders use better common sense in balancing societal risks in the future.

When an issue surfaces that the progressive mob doesn’t like, you can bet a few woke corporations will swoop down and act like the fourth branch of government. The election law passed in Georgia is just the most recent example. Corporate influence and interference is now spreading to other states now considering laws to improve election integrity.

You might wonder why the country’s corporations don’t stop and consider the implications for their companies. They haven’t learned the lesson from other companies that paid a price in their bottom line for social activism. A few examples are Dick’s Sporting Goods, Target Stores, and Gillette.

The CEO of Coca Cola took to the media to voice his displeasure (using a British accent) about the Georgia voting law. Almost immediately, that brought attention to the company doing business in China with oppressive human rights violations.

The CEO of Delta Airlines seems to think it is racist to require Georgia voters to show an ID when Delta requires every passenger to do so at check in. Is he the best voice for the oppressed when you consider that he makes more money in one day than the average American makes in a year? Add to that the revelation that Delta had been working with legislative leaders to exclude some controversial proposals, and then suddenly jumped into debate as if this was the first they heard of the bill.

Have you noticed that corporations never jump into a political debate until they feel they have more to lose by being neutral? They fear the progressive mob, but perhaps it is time for them to fear the moderate and conservative consumer. They also drink soda, fly airplanes, and buy baseball tickets.

Most Americans really don’t want companies and corporations to take sides. Produce the best product or service. Stay out of politics and the culture wars.

The Biden administration thinks they may have found a way to promote higher corporate taxes to American voters. President Joe Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen claim this is all about ending “the global race to the bottom.”

It is obvious that the president wants to raise our corporate taxes, but who knew that he also wants to raise them across the world? He and the Treasury secretary want to establish a “minimum global corporate tax rate.”

A little history is in order. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act reformed America’s corporate tax code after many other nations have already taken steps to reform their tax code. If you look at the various European countries in the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), most of them have a corporate tax rate similar to America’s 21 percent corporate tax rate.

President Biden wants to raise the current rate to 28 percent. That might encourage some companies to move their headquarters or their operations to other countries. In the past, there were many news stories about corporate inversion (where a company reincorporates abroad to reduce their tax burden). There haven’t been too many news stories like that in recent years because of the 2017 corporate tax cut.

If President Biden is successful in raising the US corporate tax rate, he would hope that Secretary Yellen could also convince other countries to raise their rates so America wouldn’t lose US companies.

This attempt to establish a global minimum corporate tax rate is being portrayed as a “global race to the bottom.” Actually, it is a classic example of tax competition. Some countries are willing to have a lower tax rate to encourage business development. That is good for those countries and good for those companies. It’s not a race to the bottom.

Progressives in Washington, D.C. are supporting several measures that target the core values upon which this nation was built. Here are some examples.

There are many dangerous elements of the Equality Act, but one of the most alarming is the way it targets religious freedom. There isn’t a more fundamental American value than religious freedom.

The For the People Act is another dangerous bill before the Senate. Not only would this bill weaken our election security by subjecting elections to federal control; it would also violate the constitutional principle of allowing states to determine their own election rules and procedures. This takes more power away from the people.

These are just a couple examples of the way progressive legislation and political policies are undermining core American values. Obviously, they cause all of us great concern, as they should. And yet, there is also reason to be optimistic about America’s future. Some recent surveys illustrate this very well.

Did you know that 73 percent of Americans believe that the nation should be unified around the values of freedom, equality, and self-governance? That’s according to a Rasmussen survey from last year.

A 2019 Gallup poll found that the majority of Americans identify as either conservative or moderate. The leftist fringes of society may be aggressive in their political agenda, but they don’t represent the average American.

The problem is that from a young age, Americans are getting fed the wrong information. Americans can make the right decisions for our future only if they are given the right information, and by that, I mean the truth.

We are committed to giving our listeners at Point of View the truth. And that’s why I do this Viewpoints commentary every day. We all need the truth.

Three major scientific discoveries in the past century point to God. That is the argument Dr. Stephen Meyer makes in a recent commentary in The Federalist, which is based on his new book, Return of the God Hypothesis.

The first significant discovery is that the physical universe likely had a beginning. This is contrary to the expectations of scientific materialists who assumed that the material universe was eternal and thus self-existent.

Scientists discovered that galaxies far from the earth were receding faster than those close at hand. The observed “red shift” demonstrated that the universe was expanding from an initial Big Bang. Later evidence also confirmed these observations that contradicted the expectations of scientific materialists and confirmed those of traditional theists.

Second, physicists have discovered that we live in a kind of “Goldilocks universe.” Scientists are finding fundamental physical laws and parameters of our universe that have been finely tuned, against all odds, to make our universe capable of hosting life.

This points to the possibility that a cosmic “fine-tuner” exists. Former Cambridge astrophysicist, Sir Fred Hoyle argued: “A common-sense interpretation of the data suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics” to make life possible.

Third, discoveries in molecular biology have revealed the presence of digital code at the foundation of life. This suggests a master programmer behind the genetic structure of DNA. Bill Gates acknowledged that “DNA is like a computer program, but far, far more advanced than any software we’ve ever created.”

These three scientific discoveries all point to the existence of a Creator God.