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Category: Big Mother (page 8 of 15)

March 31, 2010

The sad story of how my wife, my family and my own life were devastated by the the unhappy effects of… sad stories…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

At a certain age, you come to feel you’ve got a pretty tight bead on things. Wife, home, kids, job — everything just seems to come together. But then you find out that you’ve built your life on solid quicksand.

I’ll tell you my story. I don’t expect you to believe it, but it’s as true as last night’s TV news. You see, my whole world came crashing down around my ears because of a peril I had never thought to fear — until it was too late.

That peril? Anecdote addiction.

There I was, Joe Normal, watching re-runs and waiting for the game to come on, when my wife would relate some juicy bit of gossip she’d heard at the beauty parlor. Only to her it was more than that. Not just a story — a symptom, a syndrome.

First it was just an anecdote now and then. Always blown way out of proportion, but, hey, it’s just small-talk, right?

But then the stories started coming thick and fast. And they always seemed to be connected, somehow, in my loving wife’s fertile mind. And before you knew it, she started coming up with solutions, prescriptions, Rube Goldberg contraptions that, she thought, would ameliorate these imaginary syndromes.

Well, kitchen-table schemes are one thing, but, before long, she had graduated to movements, slogans, web sites, bogus academic studies buttressed by bogus academic conferences — the works.

And through all this turmoil, our mariage was going straight down the tubes. We went from home-cooked meals to frozen food, thus to leave her time for picketing and activism. The children learned to dress themselves from the dirty clothes hamper, their mother was so distracted. And as for our sex life — well, you do the math.

And yet through all this, I was in denial. “Where’s the harm?” I would ask myself. After all, the entire country is addicted to anecdotes. We’ll stare cold, hard facts right in the face, denying them utterly in preference to a carefully-crafted sob-story. If it weren’t for treacly anecdotes, there would be no news business, no entertainment industry, no politics in America.

And, of course, it was Read more

March 24, 2010

My kind of doctor: “I am responding to the situation created by this new law by exercising my right not to participate in any health insurance program.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A letter from a sane doctor, posted at The Corner on NationalReview.com:

March 23, 2010

My Dear Patient,

As you must know, Congress has just passed extensive legislation governing health care delivery and insurance systems. Whether you agree with what it does or not, we are all now subject to this law and its sweeping changes.

I have always conducted my medical practice with my patient’s best interests as my first priority. Although not legally obliged to do so, I have routinely provided you with a receipt that has all the codes necessary to bill your own health insurance company for any reimbursement to which you are entitled. Until now, that insurance company was a free enterprise despite the fact that it was heavily regulated by state and federal laws. Now the situation is quite different. Through the new law’s mandates, regulatory powers and reform, health insurance is and will be largely a government activity which will have an ever larger jurisdiction over how doctors practice, make clinical judgments and are paid.

The new law provides for about 150 new government agencies, many of which are designed to be ‘oversight’ bureaucracies which will have the right to decide what medical care is legal to provide through insurance. Among other things, they will have the right to review my medical care of you and read your medical record. Now, as soon as you submit our economic transaction to your insurance company for reimbursement, you have involved me in these regulations and put me in the jurisdiction of government for my activities, decisions and behavior as your doctor.

No one can have two masters. Either I can serve you as my patient or I can serve the government. Either I can continue to make your welfare and health my only concern, including the protection of your privacy and medical records, or I can abide by ever-increasing amounts of government regulations and dictates to my decisions. I can’t do both. I choose to continue to follow my conscience and practice medicine to serve you.

For this reason, I am responding to the situation created by this new law by exercising Read more

March 24, 2010

Historian Robert Higgs: “Citizen, be careful what you wish for; the government just might give it to you good and hard.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Nothing Outside the State

by Robert Higgs

A popular slogan of the Italian Fascists under Mussolini was, “Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato” (everything for the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state). I recall this expression frequently as I observe the state’s far-reaching penetration of my own society.

What of any consequence remains beyond the state’s reach in the United States today? Not wages, working conditions, or labor-management relations; not health care; not money, banking, or financial services; not personal privacy; not transportation or communication; not education or scientific research; not farming or food supply; not nutrition or food quality; not marriage or divorce; not child care; not provision for retirement; not recreation; not insurance of any kind; not smoking or drinking; not gambling; not political campaign funding or publicity; not real estate development, house construction, or housing finance; not international travel, trade, or finance; not a thousand other areas and aspects of social life.

One might affirm that the state still keeps its hands off religion, but it actually does not. It certifies certain religious organizations as legitimate and condemns others, as many young men discovered to their sorrow when they attempted to claim the status of conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. It assigns members of certain religions, but not members of others, as chaplains in its armed services.

Besides, isn’t statism itself a religion for most Americans? Do they not honor the state above all else, above even the commandments of a conventional religion they may embrace? If their religion tells them “thou shalt not murder,” but the state orders them to murder, then they murder. If the state tells them to rob, to destroy property, and to imprison innocent people, then, notwithstanding any religious strictures, they rob, destroy property, and imprison innocent people, as millions of victims of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and millions of victims of the so-called Drug War in this country will attest. Moreover, in every form of adversity, Americans look to the state for their personal salvation, just as before the twentieth century their ancestors looked Read more

March 22, 2010

Libertarian Politics, Facebook Videos & Much Much More

by

Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

It’s going to take a decade, at least.  Probably longer.   But, we’ll reclaim this country in word and deed…without being corrupted or corruptible.   I have hope….because I know what side I’m on.

It starts and ends with education: overcoming the crap that’s poured into our heads about the nature of the world, overcoming the “pseudoeconomics” .  It starts with me continuing to educate myself, pointing out ideas to others.

I’m in with both feet.  What I did before prepared me for this.  3 weeks ago, Jeremiah Arn and I were talking.  How fast could we get quality stuff done?  How cheap.  He was shocked, as NetBoots quoted him $2500+ for baseline functionality.  I can do what they can do cheaper–partly because WP has a bigger community than Drupal, partly because we’ve done this for a while, and partly because Flat Rate Web Jobs has built ton of sites and has a decent system in place for at least that portion of the experience.  Cloning that and focusing on speedy delivery is key.

So, now, I make libertarian campaign websites for a living.  We’ll deliver five this week. First one off the line was last week  We were faster than their people were ready with copy.  That never happens.   For you Austinites that never read BHB, please vote for liberty minded Glen Mayes for school board starting April 26th.

Campaigns need speed–period.  That’s what they have to have to win, you recruit a candidate, you get them ready for primaries, then you have 50-60 days, tops to do everything.  Each day is a big portion of the total time, and waiting a week for a website is a killer.  When I worked on my campaign vendor delays were the #1 source of stress.

And there’s no excuse for that: with SQL every frollicking thing we do is a database entry.  See?  WP/Thesis/all of it.  It boils down to one database that we can re-use, re-deploy and set all the variables for with one form.  Call me a vendorslut already.  Whatever. We make it fast and we make it better with every iteration.  You know, a loop.

We Read more

March 21, 2010

SplendorQuest: Redemption is egoism in action: Even if other people are criminal, I am not — but I will not cause them to become good by becoming a criminal myself.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I wrote this a dozen years ago, and I’ve posted it here before. It’s apposite today, because, to all indications, we are all about to be involuntarily inducted into a cannibal cult. My question for you: Will you choose to be devoured by your neighbors, or will you elect to devour them instead? –GSS

 
What I want to discuss is Socrates’ question about whether it is better to inflict an injury or to have an injury inflicted upon you. It’s a favorite of sophists and sophomores, I know, but I think it strikes at the very core of justice. The justice I seek and seek to defend is not “out there”, apart from myself. Justice (or injustice) is not what others do to me, it’s what I do to myself and to others. Where I find myself availing myself of the fallacies tu quoque or two wrongs make a right, I am rationalizing injustice, and the worst havoc I am wreaking is upon my own ego.

The Nazarene’s answer to Socrates was this: It is better to have an injury inflicted upon you, because redemption is still possible to one who has not inflicted injury upon another. I don’t believe in an afterlife and I don’t believe redemption hinges upon any one event. But I do believe that a “justice” that is itself unjust is vain at best and evil at worst.

We can make a joke by saying, “Political philosophy is the means by which ethical systems betray themselves.” There are actually a host of reasons for this, and all of them are amusing to me. For one, a political system has a meta-goal apart from the ethical system in which it is rooted: It must function in the real world.

Moreover, the political system itself has a meta-ethical or even extra-ethical goal in that its proponents will tend to imbue it with what they view are essential survival characteristics even if these betray the ethical system in which the political philosophy is putatively based. Any form of argument that the polity can or should or must do what it would be immoral or Read more

February 28, 2010

Mark Steyn: “When Responsibility Doesn’t Pay”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

National Review Online:

Think of Greece as California: Every year an irresponsible and corrupt bureaucracy awards itself higher pay and better benefits paid for by an ever-shrinking wealth-generating class. And think of Germany as one of the less profligate, still-just-about-functioning corners of America such as my own state of New Hampshire: Responsibility doesn’t pay. You’ll wind up bailing out anyway. The problem is there are never enough of “the rich” to fund the entitlement state, because in the end it disincentivizes everything from wealth creation to self-reliance to the basic survival instinct, as represented by the fertility rate. In Greece, they’ve run out Greeks, so they’ll stick it to the Germans, like French farmers do. In Germany, the Germans have only been able to afford to subsidize French farming because they stick their defense tab to the Americans. And in America, Obama, Pelosi, and Reid are saying we need to paddle faster to catch up with the Greeks and Germans. What could go wrong?

February 25, 2010

Meet the Third Thing…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

[This is an essay I wrote in the mid-1990s, an attempt to explain to libertarians, especially various flavors of devotees of Ayn Rand, why the idea of a minimal state must always fail — just as the minimal state as envisioned in 1789 is failing right now. The argument holds up well, I think — though I am by now less lean-look’d a prophet. It’s just that no one wants to hear it… –GSS]

 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming

The first thing to do is laugh, of course.

We stare tragedy right in the face, so close to it we can smell its stale breath, and it is reaching for us.

Everything we say should not, must not, cannot happen — every bit of it does happen. Teenage gang-bangers with AR-15s car-jack Sally Suburbanite and toss her baby out the window. Middle-aged speed freaks imprison their own mothers and force them to write bad checks. One-hundred-thirty-five years after emancipation, people are owned as slaves and the value of their labor is stolen from them. The falcon cannot hear the falconer and Vicky Weaver and 81 Branch Davidians lay slain.

Should not. Must not. Cannot. Does.

And there’s plenty more, of course, and every bit of it is tragic. Except us, for we are tragic Read more

February 25, 2010

A Future By Halves vs. A Future of Have-Nots

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

Voluntaryism vs Social Democracy

Two quick polls: First, all those who enjoy belonging to a society that provides some minimal safety net for the least among us, please raise your hands… Ahh, I see some hands going up. Very good. Second, all those who occasionally enjoy being forced to do something against their will by threat of a gun, please raise your hands… Right, masochists aside I see no hands raised. Very good. The problem is, you cannot have one without the other. Thus spoke the Voluntaryists.

On Monday night I was invited by fellow Bloodhound Brian Brady to attend a debate entitled Voluntaryism/Market Anarchy vs. Democratic-Socialism held in a little hot bed of thought and cafe called Cafe Libertalia. It was an engaging evening spent listening to the point / counter-point discussion on the very legitimacy of government itself. You can gain a more detailed understanding of Voluntaryism here and of Social Democracy here. (Although if you’re a regular reader of BHB you’ve no doubt gained quite a bit of free-market, Voluntaryism philosophy from our Greek emeritus: Greg Swann.)

I must be honest in admitting that I know quite a bit less about Social Democracy philosophy than I do Voluntaryism, and the debate was of little help. The team on the Social Democracy side presented a less than cogent argument for a society wherein free markets and democracy exist in ever changing ratios, as dictated by the people themselves. When asked, the speakers could not name a single  society where this system currently exists.  When pressed, they admitted that the countries currently attempting it are abysmal failures.  But this did not dissuade them from the idea that it could exist. Their logic – such as it was – stemmed from the idea of pure democracy (one man, one vote) and concluded that the majority would decide which means of production should be left to the free markets and which to the nurturing womb of centralized government. “How can you be against that?” they asked.  “We’re not advocating government take-over; we’re saying Read more

February 17, 2010

The Real Problem with the Morons and Cowards at #RTB

by

Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

Greg put me on this #RTB nonsense. I will say this: anyone who supports increased prelicensing requirements  is a lazy coward who is deluding himself into mediocrity by legislation.   They don’t want to compete with young whipper snappers, so they make it harder.  Even the most innocuous opinion by Real Life Sheri is dead wrong.  The responsibility for education lies with the practitioners, not with someone that’s disseminating information.  I didn’t learn anything from my prelicensing except this: that my Real Estate Career was going to be filled with egomanical blowhards that were going to do their best to maximize the drama in a transaction.  And that the state had the power to make me sit through 120 hours of nonsense before I could tell full grown adults that “this…is the living room.”

That’s the insanity of getting in bed with the government.  When you advocate increased rules, you’re carrying a scorpion across the river and expecting something good to happen.  The result will be destruction, always.

However, I’m certain that #RTB is to succeed.  It’s a perfect example of Johnson’s law: All randomly generated bad ideas that benefit the government will find a willing partner in the government for their execution.   See, the government doesn’t need to plot and scheme to get bigger.  Once she attains a critical mass, people will kowtow and bring her offerings in the form of enslaving ideas.  There is no conspiracy, there are no black helicopters.  There is nothing but a bunch of morons abdicating their use of a brain and ceding what is rightly theirs to a government or trade organization.  That’s enough to create massive growth in  the government.

Ken Brand puts it nicely:

I don’t want to raise the bar, I want to take the steel bar and beat the crap out of the leaders (Broker’s/Sales Managers/Team Leaders/etc. who hire, support, allow, retain and reward people who violate natural laws of human interaction, common sense and professional conduct (as defined by our association).

He also gives the just deserts to the consumers that accept morons.  When you advance the causes of government you are a friend to Read more

February 11, 2010

We are all on welfare now: “The government’s assistance in the housing market now is less about giving us a soft landing than it is about having us furiously flap our arms to stay aloft.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The Washington Examiner:

The unspoken, bottom line: The federal government has already nationalized the housing industry. We’re not just talking about Uncle Sam providing a few subsidies, or even taking over a few of the big players, as they have in the auto industry. This is a complete takeover. Every new mortgage today is a government mortgage.

Over the last two years, government mortgage and mortgage-backed holdings have grown on net by nearly $1 trillion. Private investors and institutions have shed more than $1.5 trillion — through foreclosure losses, pay downs, and by selling to government.

The effective result is a government-run housing market. Barofsky reports that right now, the government is responsible for about 100 percent of all new mortgage activity. You read that correctly. To put it in his own words:

“According to Federal Reserve net borrowings data, the federal government and the organizations it backs now guarantee or issue almost all net new borrowings for mortgages and MBS.”

February 4, 2010

A Scary Thought on the (Non-Existent?) Shadow Inventory

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

The shadow inventory has been a topic of interest with almost every agent I talk to lately.  Most believe it is large and few understand why it isn’t in the marketplace rather than held by the banks.  Russell Shaw recently wrote about the shadow inventory being gibberish.   It is an interesting article and one I recommend reading.

I rarely disagree with Mr. Shaw, and rather than do so now I’ll simply suggest that we are talking past one another.  As I read it, he is suggesting that this inventory doesn’t exist because it is, for the most part, out there already; just not listed as REO.  He makes it quite clear, however, that he is not talking about foreclosures still to come. (Apologies to Russell for over-simplifying.)  This is where we begin to part ways.  I submit that the shadow inventory must necessarily include not only actual REOs (or REOs not listed as REOs), but the entire picture.

More to the point, if we look at all the homes that have been foreclosed on, are in foreclosure and should be in foreclosure, we are left scratching our heads and find ourselves back to the same question: why aren’t the banks taking these homes in, putting them on the market, and selling them?   (I’m talking here especially about those homes where people have stopped making their payments and continue to live for 6, 12, even more months.)

MORTGAGES IN DEFAULT
Here’s a graph courtesy of the New York Times:

Sources: Federal Reserve Board and Mortgage Bankers Association, via Haver Analytics

That is an awful lot of mortgages in foreclosure; but add to that that lower line – of mortgages in default and not yet in foreclosure – and the numbers are staggering (again, think of people staying on a year after they’ve stopped making payments).  So no matter what we call it, the question remains: What are the banks doing? Why aren’t these mortgages foreclosed?  Why isn’t this inventory on the market?

I know all real estate is local and there are plenty of areas around this country where the last thing agents want Read more

January 22, 2010

Barney Frank: “I believe this committee will be recommending, abolishing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in their current form and coming up with a whole new system of housing finance.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

To say anything at all would be way too much. From the Wall Street Journal:

“The remedy here is…as I believe this committee will be recommending, abolishing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in their current form and coming up with a whole new system of housing finance,” said Rep. Barney Frank (D., Mass.), the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.

His comments initially rippled through bond markets on concerns that the government might pull away from the mortgage market. Many believe that’s unlikely and that any revamp would include continued government involvement. The government took over the companies in September 2008 as loan losses mounted.

Some Republicans have argued that the companies should ultimately be reduced in size and privatized, while at other end of the spectrum, some analysts have recommended turning the companies into government agencies. But several industry groups and academics have suggested that the government is likely to continue playing at least some role in the future of the companies.

One such report came from analysts at Standard & Poor’s this past week. “It’s hard for us to imagine” how enough capital could be attracted to replace Fannie and Freddie with stand-alone private companies that would be able to offer low-cost funding for 30-year fixed-rate mortgages, the analysts wrote.

Some analysts have argued that starting from scratch could create more problems than they would solve, in part because Fannie and Freddie own or guarantee around half of the nation’s $11 trillion in home mortgages. “Blue sky ideas are great, but they take a long time to happen,” said Mahesh Swaminathan, senior mortgage strategist at Credit Suisse, at a conference last month. “When you have $5 trillion of agency mortgages, you can’t really orphan them.”

Mr. Frank, who didn’t elaborate on forthcoming recommendations, said last month that one possible revamp could merge some functions of Fannie and Freddie that overlap with the Federal Housing Administration into the government mortgage-insurance agency.

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