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There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Big Mother (page 7 of 15)

June 1, 2010

Dear National Association of Realtors: How about you fetid, rotting pusswads do something patriotic and get off the taxpayer’s tit…?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

To say the truth, I’m kindasorta liking the Tea Party movement — as far as it goes. I don’t think we’re at a turning of the tides — although I can at least hope that we might be before too long. Any sort of discussion of individual rights is a good thing, but it doesn’t do, I don’t think, to expect too much philosophically from these folks just yet.

Consider: The self-anointed “progressives” were committed, knowing Marxists who developed an incremental strategy for razing individualism in the United States and raising collectivism in its place.

By contrast, the Tea Partyites seem to me to be largely unconscious Marxists promoting a grab-bag of unconnected tactics generally aimed at temporarily delaying the “progress” of the “progressives.”

In other words, the true Marxists know what they want and the (sad-to-say) clueless Marxists portend, at least thus far, to be nothing more than a flat tire on the road to mass extermination — the unvarying end-consequence of Marxism.

That could change, but only if the Tea Party folks engage their battle philosophically and not just tactically.

How will we be able to tell when they’ve done this? One quick bellwether would be for them to get their hands out of the public till, to the extent that they can. I do understand that many people have so mismanaged their finances — at the behest of the “progressives” — that they can only remain alive by sucking on the taxpayer’s tit. That’s sad, and I would follow a different course in the same circumstances.

But many of the Tea Partyites accepting government checks could easily do without them. We’ll know they’re serious — are you listening Drs. Ron and Rand Paul? — when they publicly refuse to accept even one penny that has been stolen from innocent taxpayers.

That’s a debate for another day, though. Here’s a little something closer to hand. Today I was spammed by the professional sucktits at the National Association of Realtors entreating me to help them rape the taxpayers — again. Apparently, all human progress will be stopped cold if we do not continue to reward Class-A morons Read more

May 29, 2010

“If wind and solar power were practical, entrepreneurs would invest in it. There would be no need for government to take money from taxpayers and give it to people pushing green products.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

John Stossel on the phractured physics of “green” energy:

Maybe the electric car is the next big thing?

“Electric cars are the next big thing, and they always will be.”

There have been impressive headlines about electric cars from my brilliant colleagues in the media. The Washington Post said, “Prices on electric cars will continue to drop until they’re within reach of the average family.”

That was in 1915.

In 1959, The New York Times said, “Electric is the car of the tomorrow.”

In 1979, The Washington Post said, “GM has an electric car breakthrough in batteries, now makes them commercially practical.”

I’m still waiting.

“The problem is very simple,” Bryce said. “It’s not political will. It’s simple physics. Gasoline has 80 times the energy density of the best lithium ion batteries. There’s no conspiracy here of big oil or big auto. It’s a conspiracy of physics.”

Yes, Stossel is pop-science. You can only go so far with him. But this may be the only article you will see that explains why so many of the highly-touted environmentaloid “solutions” are pipe-dreams, based in wishful thinking and a math education that foundered on the shoals of Algebra. Read the whole thing.

May 27, 2010

Like bugs trapped in amber, take a close look at Rotarian Socialist cockroaches and the pusillanimous pissants who make them possible.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is from today’s Arizona Republic:

Businesses that send employees door to door through Phoenix neighborhoods have jumped into the discussion over whether the city should require peddlers to be licensed before ringing doorbells.

Phoenix is the only major city in the Valley that does not require some sort of business license for door-to-door solicitors. In the past year, council members have been getting complaints about bad behavior by people who sell door to door.

On Tuesday, about 25 residents and business representatives gathered at the Phoenix Public Library’s main branch for the first of seven public hearings the city will hold on the issue.

Of course we need a new law. Why should fully-grown adults be expected to confront and respond to “bad behavior” without Big Brother to scare away the bad guys and Big Mother to kiss their boo-boos?

But wait. There’s more.

About half of those attending represented areas that are fed up with solicitors. The rest represented businesses that had a range of opinions on regulation.

This is a fact: Business “regulations” are written by and for the businesses putatively being “regulated.” They put the Rotarian in Rotarian Socialism. Hide and watch:

“We are in favor of regulation and monitoring of door-to-door solicitors,” said Magnolia Lee, who described herself as business consultant who represents a small group called Sales, Solicitation and Distribution United.

“There needs to be some sort of standard for professional and courteous conduct,” she said.

What’s the standard? Me-and-mine, not thee-and-thine. The “regulations” will advantage Lee’s clients by disadvantaging their competitors. This is the objective sought by all “regulation.”

But we’re not done yet:

Marc Scher, government relations director for the Phoenix Association of Realtors, said his group favors licensing people who ring doorbells to sell products but wants any new law to exempt real estate sales people seeking listings.

“Realtors have been going and knocking on doors and introducing themselves to their neighbors,” he said. “There has to be a differentiation between selling a product and a relationship.”

This would the the anti-dog-eat-dog rule, straight out of Atlas Shrugged. Steal the other guy’s dinner, but keep your mitts off mine! Makes you proud to be a Realtor, Read more

May 26, 2010

What caused the housing crisis? Perverse government incentives.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Form an academic paper by George Mason University Economics Professor Russell Roberts:

Beginning in the mid-1990s, home prices in many American cities began a decade-long climb that proved to be an irresistible opportunity for investors. Along the way, a lot of people made a great deal of money. But by the end of the first decade of the twenty- first century, too many of these investments turned out to be much riskier than many people had thought. Homeowners lost their houses, financial institutions imploded, and the entire financial system was in turmoil.

How did this happen? Whose fault was it? Some blame capitalism for being inherently unstable. Some blame Wall Street for its greed, hubris, and stupidity. But greed, hubris, and stupidity are always with us. What changed in recent years that created such a destructive set of decisions that culminated in the collapse of the housing market and the financial system?

In this paper, I argue that public-policy decisions have perverted the incentives that naturally create stability in financial markets and the market for housing. Over the last three decades, government policy has coddled creditors, reducing the risk they face from financing bad investments. Not surprisingly, this encouraged risky investments financed by borrowed money. The increasing use of debt mixed with housing policy, monetary policy, and tax policy crippled the housing market and the financial sector. Wall Street is not blameless in this debacle. It lobbied for the policy decisions that created the mess.

In the United States we like to believe we are a capitalist society based on individual responsibility. But we are what we do. Not what we say we are. Not what we wish to be. But what we do. And what we do in the United States is make it easy to gamble with other people’s money—particularly borrowed money—by making sure that almost everybody who makes bad loans gets his money back anyway. The financial crisis of 2008 was a natural result of these perverse incentives. We must return to the natural incentives of profit and loss if we want to prevent future crises.

May 23, 2010

The greatest risk of resurrgent statism is that we will forsake the unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Arthur C. Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute in The Washington Post:

The new statism in America, made possible by years of drift and accelerated by the panic over the economic crisis, threatens to make us permanently poorer. But that is not the greatest danger. The real risk is that in the new culture war, we will forsake the third unalienable right set out in our Declaration of Independence: the pursuit of happiness.

Free enterprise brings happiness; redistribution does not. The reason is that only free enterprise brings earned success.

Earned success involves the ability to create value honestly — not by inheriting a fortune, not by picking up a welfare check. It doesn’t mean making money in and of itself. Earned success is the creation of value in our lives or in the lives of others. Earned success is the stuff of entrepreneurs who seek value through innovation, hard work and passion. Earned success is what parents feel when their children do wonderful things, what social innovators feel when they change lives, what artists feel when they create something of beauty.

Money is not the same as earned success but is rather a symbol, important not for what it can buy but for what it says about how people are contributing and what kind of difference they are making. Money corresponds to happiness only through earned success.

Not surprisingly, unearned money — while it may help alleviate suffering — carries with it no personal satisfaction. Studies of lottery winners, for instance, show that after a brief period of increased happiness, their moods darken as they no longer derive the same enjoyment from the simple pleasures in life, and as the glow of buying things wears off.

The same results emerge with other kinds of unearned income — welfare payments, for example. According to the University of Michigan’s 2001 Panel Study of Income Dynamics, going on the welfare rolls increases by 16 percent the likelihood of a person saying that she or he has felt inconsolably sad over the past month. Of course, the misery of welfare recipients probably goes well beyond the check itself. Nonetheless, studies Read more

May 22, 2010

Everything the ancient Greeks warned us about democracy has come true in modern Greece — and right here in River City as well

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Mark Steyn in Macleans:

Traditionally, a bank is a means by which old people with capital lend to young people with ideas. But the advanced democracies with their mountains of sovereign debt are in effect old people who’ve blown through their capital and are all out of ideas looking for young people flush enough to bail them out. And the idea that it might be time for the spendthrift geezers to change their ways butts up against their indestructible moral vanity. Last year, President Sarkozy said that the G20 summit provided “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to give capitalism a conscience.” European capitalism may have a conscience. It’s not clear it has a pulse. And, actually, when you’re burning Greek bank clerks to death in defence of your benefits, your “conscience” isn’t much in evidence, either.

Let us take it as read that Greece is an outlier. As waggish officials in Brussels and Strasbourg will tell you, it only snuck into the EU due to some sort of clerical error. It’s a cesspit of sloth and corruption even by Mediterranean standards. On my last brief visit, Athens was a visibly decrepit dump: a town with a handful of splendid ancient ruins surrounded by a multitude of hideous graffiti-covered contemporary ruins. If you were going to cut one “advanced” social democracy loose and watch it plunge into the abyss pour encourager les autres, it would be hard to devise a better candidate than Greece.

And yet and yet . . . riot-wracked Athens isn’t that much of an outlier. Greece’s 2010 budget deficit is 12.2 per cent of GDP; Ireland’s is 14.7. Greece’s debt is 125 per cent of GDP; Italy’s is 117 per cent. Greece’s 65-plus population will increase from 18 per cent in 2005 to 25 per cent in 2030; Spain’s will increase from 17 per cent to 25 per cent. As lazy, feckless, squalid, corrupt and violent as Greece undoubtedly is, it’s not that untypical. It’s where the rest of Europe’s headed, and Japan and North America shortly thereafter. About half the global economy is living beyond not only its means but its diminished number of children’s means.

Instead Read more

May 21, 2010

The Next bubble to burst: Government!

by

Realtor, Media Mogul

Author website

I’ve been a bit slow on this one.  I have been wondering what sector of the economy was going to over inflate and burst next.  The answer has been right in front of me the whole time but the reason I did not see it very clearly is because I was wondering what part of the private economy would burst next.  Sure, I knew the government was in trouble, but I did not think of it as a “bubble”, like real estate or the dot.com era.

A simple headline today put the perfect perspective out there for me to get it.  If I apply “bubble economics” to the government sector, it is perfectly clear.

The economic collapse of Greece is a wake-up call. The unsustainable combination of a bloated public bureaucracy, high deficit spending and unfunded pension obligations busted Greece’s government bubble. Now the birthplace of modern democracy is on the brink of becoming a failed state.

The Bank of England recently warned that the U.S. is on the road to the same fiscal failure as Greece, and the Obama administration’s insistence on massive public spending and increasing deficits is the reason.

At this rate, the U.S. government will be the next economic bubble to burst. We’ve seen similar downturns: the information technology bubble in 2000, housing in 2007 and Wall Street in 2008. If unchecked, America’s government bubble will depress our economy with higher interest rates and defaulting state and local governments.

Politicians Aren’t Businessmen

Federal spending alone this year accounts for 25% of our nation’s gross domestic product. If you add state and local spending, the number is closer to 50%. No economy can thrive when nearly half of all economic output is directed by politicians rather than entrepreneurs and small businesses.

After big government spending, government employee unions pose a serious threat to America’s fiscal health. Over the past 30 years, union membership has declined significantly, from 23% of all workers in 1980 to about 12% today. But the percentage of union members working for government has Read more

May 20, 2010

Rand Paul’s take on private property rights is correct — and daring to tell unfamiliar, uncomfortable truths to voters is laudable.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Well.

I’m thinking that “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” has brought us a nearly universal display of cowardice from the RE.net. If I am mistaken in this, I will happily amend my error with a link and a courtly bow. But I expect there is even more room for quivering, quibbling, cowering, caviling cowardice on this fine and perfect day.

Like this: The position Kentucky senatorial candidate Rand Paul took on property rights yesterday is correct — not just as regards property rights, but as an expression of the errors we need to correct in the body politic if we are to reemerge, eventually, as something resembling a civilized society.

The left is attempting to smear Paul as a racist for insisting that private property owners themselves have the moral authority to be racists, even if Paul and virtually everyone else find that position to be morally-repugnant. This Two-Minutes-Hate campaign doesn’t seem like a winning strategy to me, in the age of the internet. The left will have no trouble finding reasons to hate Rand Paul, but his own tea party admirers may find in his principled arguments even more cause to admire him.

But mainstream Republicans are in full-reverse mode, backing away from Paul as quickly as they can. This seems to me to be a mistake. The tea party movement is an artifact of the age of the internet. At the least, tea partiers check up on the things they are told by the mainstream media. And it seems plausible to me that many of those folks are aware that the United States has been pursuing the wrong policies — as a matter of philosophy — since the end of the nineteenth century, at least. Anyone seeking greater human liberty has to regard this present moment as an incredible opportunity to get ordinary Americans thinking about ideas they might never have considered before. For Republicans to race away from the actual philosophy of liberty seems to me to be hugely stupid.

So let’s start here: Racism is by far the stupidest and most morally-repugnant form of collectivism. This is completely obvious to any thoughtful individualist, Read more

May 15, 2010

@tcar’s manifesto: “Toothy chumps of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your brains.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Witness: “The next big project from 2nd Century will be Realtor University. A fully accredited educational institution[.]”

I do not for one second hate to say I told you so:

We know sheep will follow a Judas goat to their slaughter, as will cattle. Now the NAR is testing the idea on lemmings…

Todd Carpenter becomes one with the Borg and the charming little lemmings elbow each other out of the way to dive off the cliff head first.

One of two things will happen: Todd will discover he’s made a terrible mistake and will quit this job with dispatch — I hope very loudly. Or: Todd will deliver us to our slaughter.

Anyone who expects anything other than evil from the National Association of Realtors has either not been paying attention, or, much worse, embraces that evil.

In any case, this is not something to be celebrated, not even to affect to be “nice” in chorus with the rest of the lemmings.

The NAR may want to infest our world in order to destroy it. More likely, they want to take it over.

What they certainly do not want is to approach the public as we do — openly, authentically, concealing nothing. The entire edifice of residential real estate is founded on secrets and lies, and, as long as it is, the NAR will be nothing but a cesspit of tyrannical motives and vendorslut con games.

And — more is the pity — Todd Carpenter cannot take their money without being their shill and their Judas goat — or worse.

I’m saddened by this, because of all the gutless big-name real estate webloggers, Todd has more guts than most. But nothing good for us will come of this, and the only good that can come of it for Todd is for him to escape with his scruples intact as quickly as he can.

Too late for that now. If you’re in for a penny, you’re in for a pound.

Four years ago, almost, when I started this little project, I had huge hopes for a newer, cleaner style of real estate, one based on integrity and transparency. I’ve watched as Read more

May 4, 2010

A Salute To All The Unprofessionals Out There

by

Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

The word unprofessional has no meaning.  It’s designed to be vaguely insulting, and to be an ad hominem attack on someone that inconveniences a busy Realtor in the course of his or her day.  Nobody wants to be unprofessional. Folks sling it around on twitter on a daily basis.  Follow the #RTB hashtag for details.  It’s an insult below the surface: any agent  that doesn’t immediately cater to the irrelevant demands of a competitor risks being called unprofessional.  When I was a mortgage broker, I was first called “unprofessional” when I didn’t want to listen to the pitch of a dumpy salesperson that walked unbidden into my office.   I see it coming: another coercive assault on innovation, on hustle, on passion.    Anything that rocks the boat is to be called unprofessional.

Unprofessional.

What, then, is a professional?   Congenial, and cowed.  They wear the yokes of the big brokers proudly, making nice at the big agent meetings and the Barcamps and the other exercises in irrelevance that show that they are people people. These professionals sell but few houses, but dog gone it, they do it in a way that their other professionals don’t object to.  They attend their board meetings and they advocate rulings that help one another…and in the name of more standards (for others), they add paperwork and tedium to the job of representing buyers, sellers and borrowers.

And if you glance askance at any idea, you run the risk of being called unethical in addition to unprofessional.

The real aim, of course is to have a cushy job that requires little.  To not adapt and help.  To innovate so very slowly, and of course to prevent anyone else  from entering into their space.  Of course, they all stick together.  People are professionals because they say they are, not because they care about their clients, innovation or anything else.  What is a real estate professional?  Probably someone that sells 3 homes in a calendar year and returns calls 40% of the time.  That’s probably a higher standard than 80% of the NAR reaches.

Our #RTB movement (which other word often precedes “movement”) Read more

May 3, 2010

This oil spill and the government’s belated response to it do not prove the value and efficacy of the government, but precisely the opposite.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

So I had a spam email from a state-worshipping zealot I’ve never met named Sara P. Miller. Apparently Sara P. Miller is the modern-age equivalent of those noxious creeps you used to find preaching the gospel of Jheeezuhs! on buses and subway trains, self-imprisoned in a never-silent pantomime of exhibitionism and self-loathing. I cannot be trusted to find the truth on my own, so I must have it thrust upon me by benificent busy-bodies. Good grief…

Anyway, here is Sara P. Miller’s argument, all spelling and punctuation errors faithfully reproduced: “As the sludge roles onto Louisiana’s coast, suddenly, the anti-government bashers are silent. [….] And this morning, as that horrible, poison sludge makes its tragic, putrid, photo debut, we will all believe in ‘big government.'” She defends this by making reference to a number of Rotarian Socialist statists, absolutely none of whom are anti-government. They are all exponents of the government — past or current office-holders.

And that doesn’t matter to me. I’m assuming Sara P. Miller sent this nonsense to me because I haven’t said anything about the oil spill in the gulf. “Cum taces, clamas,” say my Roman friends — “When you are silent, you shout.” Not quite. The topics I don’t write about are legion. Hell, the things I think about writing about but don’t constitute a vast library of unwritten prose. I haven’t written about this oil spill because I don’t care about it, frankly, and because I am busy.

But: The actual essence of Sara P. Miller’s argument, which she is not smart enough to make, could not be more wrong. This oil spill and the government’s belated response to it do not prove the value and efficacy of the government, but precisely the opposite. These events — and the cloying chorus of the Rotarian Socialists of both major political parties — do not argue for the glories of the state right now, but, rather, for its inglorious ignobility going back forever. The state is never anything other than crime, and the crimes being played out right now in the Gulf of Mexico are nothing other than further proof Read more

April 11, 2010

Define the Tipping Point

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

The following began as a comment to a great post put up by Greg Swann recently, in which he excerpted a terrific article from Mark Steyn on income taxes and suckers:

…by 2004, 20% of U.S. households were getting about 75% of their income from the federal government… how receptive would they be to a pitch for lower taxes, which they don’t pay, or lower government spending, of which they are such fortunate beneficiaries? How receptive would another fifth of households, who get about 40% of their income from federal programs, be to such a pitch?

I believe My Styne is talking about the “tipping point” here, something I’ve also been talking about since before the election in 2008. Once enough people are dependent on the government, we reach a tipping point from which there is no purposeful return; only failure and rebirth. This is not news.

What’s interesting (at least to me) is the actual equation marking this tipping point. Obviously if more than 50% of the populace received 100% of their income (or benefits) from the government, we’d be over the tipping point. Not much of a stretch there, but not much of a definition either. I suggest the tipping point is well below the “50% get 100%” threshold.

So what is the level? This strikes me as a very important number – and concept – to know. Where is the line if it’s not “50% getting 100%:”? For argument’s sake, let’s say we have a voting block that will endorse politicians and policies which benefit themselves. Is receiving 75% of their income from entitlements enough to effect that vote? 60%? 45%? I suggest that the block crumbles at 20%, but is monolithic at 75%, so the answer lies somewhere in between. A 30% loss of income would be pretty bad for most people, but may not be bad enough that they would forsake their principles and beliefs. At 40% though… I think we’re dialing in the range.

On top of this, we should take into account the actual voting numbers of the population. How is the tipping point affected if Read more

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