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 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.

After a mass shooting, one question rarely asked is whether there is any connection to psychiatric drugs. As I have explained in previous commentaries, there are many factors and explanations for young men who decide to shoot innocent citizens. There is no “one size fits all” explanation.

It’s worth a brief mention that many of these young men were on what are called SSRI drugs. That stands for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Correlation is not causation, but we can’t ignore that the significant increase in mass murders and suicides does correlate with the same increase in the use of these psychotropic drugs.

Just a casual search on the shooters surfaces a common pattern. So many of them were on one or more of these SSRI drugs. We have learned about the video games and movies the Columbine shooter watched but hear much less about the two drugs he was on. We have heard about the racist ideas of the young man who shot up the church in Charleston, but we have heard much less about the drug he was on.

I recently talked about the lost boys of America. We need a national conversation about why we are seeing so many mentally disturbed young men. Loneliness and isolation are an issue. Broken homes, bullying, violent video games, and several other factors contribute. But we need to add the possibility that these drugs are also a factor.

The Journal of Political Psychology put together a list of numerous mass shootings committed by young men on prescription drugs. At the least, there seems to be a correlation that is worthy of further research.

The attorney general of the state of New York would like to wipe pregnancy centers off the map, digitally. She (along with other progressive activists) is pressuring Google to remove “pregnancy centers that are not real clinics” from digital maps.

This represents the latest in what could be called the digital cancel culture. Progressives aren’t very interested in engaging their opposition in debate when they can merely remove any opposition. Conservative or Christian speakers are prevented from speaking on campus. Anyone who questions the latest progressive policy at a company can be fired. Certain perspectives on social media can be labelled disinformation and are quickly removed. There is no need to engage in debate when you can eliminate anyone who has a different viewpoint.

This latest technique reminds me of what occasionally happened in Stalinist Russia. You have probably seen some of the photos from that era where a person who was no longer supported by Stalin and his cabinet was removed from future photographs.

These attacks on pregnancy centers are hypocritical at best. Those leading the attacks on them claim to be pro-choice. But if you really wanted to provide abortion-minded women with choice, you would support pregnancy centers that truly provide them with a choice. That would be the choice NOT to have an abortion along with options for caring for the child or even putting the child up for adoption.

Perhaps you have seen this meme on Facebook. “Head to a Planned Parenthood and ask for diapers, formula, a crib, rent assistance, food, bill assistance, assistance with education for your child, health care for your child, etc. And then come and tell me pro-lifers are the ones that don’t care for children after they’re born.”

While pro-abortion activists are attacking pregnancy centers, progressives in power are working to make them disappear from digital maps. That is why we need to support these pregnancy centers like never before.

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 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.

“This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the US government closing the gold-exchange window and putting the world on a fiat monetary system.” That is how Saifedean Ammous begins his book, The Fiat Standard.

His earlier book, The Bitcoin Standard, was a bestselling book that has been translated into more than 25 languages. He argues that by first understanding the operation of bitcoin, can someone 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.”

The impact of fiat currency is that it 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 fiat life, fiat food, fiat science, fiat fuels, and fiat states. He provides detailed explanations for why the quality of the buildings we construct and the goods we buy are declining. That is due to our declining dollar. Read his books so you can understand his diagnosis and his remedy.

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 on 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 meaning and protect against judges and justices that want to change the law arbitrarily.

Americans are concerned about crime and will likely vote in these midterm elections based on those concerns. But crime is scarier now, and many politicians who might have addressed the issue in the past now ignore it.

The first point is the theme of a commentary by Peggy Noonan. She says that “the scary thing isn’t that crime is high, though it is, though not as high as in previous crime waves. What’s scary is that people no longer think the personal protective measures they used in the past apply.” It used to be that you knew not to walk in the park at night. You knew not to be downtown after midnight. But you felt safe going to an afternoon parade.

What has changed? We are no longer just at the mercy of criminals but are now at the mercy of the seriously mentally ill. They are unpredictable. She asks what was “obvious about the shooters in Uvalde and Highland Park? They were insane and dangerous.”

The second point is that we can do something about the crime problem, but many politicians don’t want to address the issue. Kyle Smith acknowledges that Democrats are willing to discuss “gun violence.” But then points out most of them show little interest in reducing it because their party leaders are willing to go easy on criminals.

He reminds us that this was not always the case. Senator Joe Biden in 1994 promoted the crime bill that he argued would reduce crime by putting more police on the streets and locking people up. At the time he boasted to law enforcement that he was on their side and claimed to be for any law that would make the streets safer.

The latest survey of voters shows that nearly nine out of ten think crime will be a major issue in the midterm elections. They also know that crime is scarier and want candidates to address the problem that is making the country less safe.

America is fragile. That is the conclusion of Victor Davis Hanson. We assume that this country can take anything thrown at it. The republic, however, is more fragile than we might imagine. He has many examples.

“We can afford 120 days in 2020 of mass rioting, $2 billion in damage, some 35 killed, and 1,500 police injured. We can easily survive an Afghanistan, and our utter and complete military humiliation. There was no problem in abandoning some $70-80 billion in military loot to terrorists.” Also, “we can jettison merit in every endeavor, from banning the world’s great books to grading math tests to running chemistry experiments. And still, a resilient America won’t notice.”

Of course, we are starting to notice. He reminds us of cities that have turned lawless, dirty, and toxic. Stores are boarded up, women cease to walk alone after sunset, and police officers rarely walk the beat.

There are solutions, like “doubling the police force, bringing back broken-windows policing, electing tough prosecutors, moving the homeless from the downtown into hospitals and supervised shelters.” Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be the will to do what worked in the past and will work again in the future.

He also mentions the fact that we have an open border where upwards of 4 million illegal aliens will flow into this country in a mere two years. Most arrived and were dispersed without audits, English, capital, income, and vaccinations. And we have no idea how to house, feed, and provide health care to these millions without background checks.

We may think this country is strong and resilient. But you can only throw so much at a country before it begins to crumble. Then you realize it is more fragile than you thought.