All of us take part in transactions everyday of our lives. A transaction is any activity that involves an exchange of value. When you breathe, you exchange carbon dioxide for oxygen. The plants win, you win. What a great and fair system of exchange. Transactions occur inside your body as well as all across the universe. In economics, we mainly focus on business transactions and their impact on our finances and our wellbeing. In this sense, a transaction is any activity in business that involves money. It occurs when something of value is exchanged with something else of value. In this arena, man has the ability to directly influence the outcome whether it is good or bad. Our Heavenly Father placed the Law of Equal Weights and Measures to establish a standard by which men and women should conduct business:
Leviticus 19:35 ‘You shall do no injustice in judgment, in measurement of length, weight, or volume. 36 You shall have honest scales, honest weights, an honest ephah, and an honest hin: I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt.
37 ‘Therefore you shall observe all My statutes and all My judgments, and perform them: I am the LORD.’ ”
There should be no question where Our Heavenly Father stands concerning business conduct. The buyer should never pay too much nor pay too little. It does work both ways. It should be a fair exchange of value. It should be a win-win situation. This standard should permeate throughout business and economics but it doesn’t. Lies, deception, misleading statements, exploitation… have all become commonplace in our society. All of these are acts of lawlessness will one day be reconciled. It seems we have to be vigilant nearly everywhere we transact business these days. How refreshing it is when we do business with an honorable person. There are many laws on the books concerning truthfulness but for the most part, they are not enforced. Man, I wished I received a hamburger that looked like the one advertised in the commercial!
Government reporting has become substandard. Why? Men have interjected their bias for political gain into the equations to improve the perception rather than simply report the facts. They understood the power of managing perception of the populace by reporting an illusion so often people actually believe it to be real. Remember the Titanic?
John Williams at www.shadowstats.com created a business of reporting the facts about the economy using the government’s own data. He simply uses the formulas the government used prior to their manipulative adjustments so that his subscribers could look at “apples to apples” comparisons, a fair look at the economic trends. He provides us “truth in the transaction”. The latest employment numbers in the following graph provide the stark comparison of the truth versus man’s manipulation”
John’s Blue line shows the reality of the U.S. unemployment. The red line shows the managed perception. Yes there are pockets of prosperity around the country but they are offset by the severity of unemployment in other areas. Remember, he uses the raw numbers generated by the government’s data collection process.
Each of us makes decisions based on the information available at the time. If the information is based on unequal weights and measures, our decision will be flawed and could prove to be disastrous. If an auto manufacturer has a design flaw in their braking system, wouldn’t you like to know before you purchased their vehicle? If a business has a history of deception, would you want to buy a product or service from them? In the end, we all want truth to prevail in our transactions.