Kerby Anderson
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 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 meanings and protect against judges and justices who want to change the law arbitrarily.

Kerby Anderson
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 he 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.