To Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke, deflation is regarded as Public Enemy Number One.

In the words of New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, the "real [economic] threat is deflation." Krugman advocates additional and even more aggressive government deficit spending.

The normally on-target Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, international business editor of The London Telegraph, favors more "quantitative easing" (i.e., a policy whereby the Fed would create trillions of new dollars with which to buy government bonds and other financial junk) to prevent deflation.

Why is deflation - by which Bernanke et al. mean "widespread declining prices" - so feared?

An Iowa Worth Fighting for was created to serve as a future firewall against entrenched status-quo power following the November 2010 elections. On August 17, 2009, the content of this comprehensive review and recommendations debuted on the Jan Mickelson radio show in Des Moines.

It spoke to some basic principles, and addressed core governing concerns - like government is best that governs least.

But it offered more than platitudes. It offered specifics that included strategies to reorganize, reduce, and re-prioritize state government; to create accountable, efficient local government; to rebuild our economy based on tax reform and citizen - not government - stimulus; to reform our education system; to promote a healthy Iowa the effective way - not through government mandate; to affirm core rights, such as the right to property; to protect Iowa's citizens; to interdict Iowa's severe drug crisis; to reform illegal immigration; and to advance real leadership principles.

On November 2, 2010, the political pendulum reversed course. Republicans again control statehouse politics. It was not even a decade ago they controlled both the House and Senate in Iowa. Which is to say: It was not a decade ago that they fought education reform, welfare reform, and the introduction of sound fiscal and management practices. When Terry Branstad left office, he had a Republican House and Senate. He did not fix welfare, education, our prisons, our courts, taxes, or our economy. While he managed the status quo much better than Governor Chet Culver - thanks to dozens of tax hikes and data manipulations - Branstad and the GOP did not repair, restore, or rebuild Iowa.

Now that he and Republicans have returned to power, simply invoking a term such as "conservative" isn't good enough. This group of statehouse leaders must lead, but to lead they must first have a plan. This means not just an agenda, but a specific vision of how we fix Iowa.

An August 28 article at the privacy-rights Web site Pogo Was Right argues that schools are "grooming youth to passively accept a surveillance state where they have no expectation of privacy anywhere." Privacy violations include "surveilling students in their bedrooms via webcam, ... random drug or locker searches, strip-searching, ... lowering the standard for searching students to 'reasonable suspicion' from 'probable cause,' [and] disciplining students for conduct outside of school hours ... ."

"No expectation of privacy anywhere" is becoming literally true. The schools are grooming kids not only for the public surveillance state, but also for the private surveillance states of their employers. By the time the human resources graduate from 12 years of factory processing, they will accept it as normal to be kept under constant surveillance -- "for your own safety," of course -- by authority figures. But they won't just accept it from Homeland Security ("if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear"). They'll also accept as "normal" a work situation in which an employer can make them pee in cups at any time, without notice, or track their online behavior even when they're away from work.

This is just part of what rogue educator John Taylor Gatto calls the "real curriculum" of public education ("The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher," 1992). The real curriculum includes the lesson that the way to advancement, in any area of life, is to find out what will please the authority figure behind the desk, then do it. It includes the lesson that the important tasks in life are those assigned to us by authority figures -- the schoolteacher, the college instructor, the boss -- and that self-assigned tasks in pursuit of our own goals are to be trivialized as "hobbies" or "recreation."

"If you're gonna tell it, tell the truth and tell it all!" was an adage I heard often as a child growing up in rural North Carolina, where hard work, honesty, and generosity anchored our deep, abiding family and community values. Entering adulthood, I learned that living this seemingly simple conviction is much more complicated than the phase itself appears. "If you're gonna tell it" implies that you've made a choice, a conscious decision to speak truth, while "tell the truth" suggests that you have knowledge or understanding of what the truth is, that you know right from wrong and fact from fiction. Finally, "tell it all" reveals that the truth cannot be selective, and you cannot conveniently or deliberately omit facts or tell part of the story. When my siblings and I sometimes landed in trouble, as children often do, my mother admonished, "I don't care what you've done or how bad it seems, I need you to tell me the truth. I can deal with the truth, but there is nothing I can do with a lie!"