BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Flourishing (page 22 of 38)

Thriving as only a rational animal can

June 14, 2010

Reasons to be cheerful, Part one: Things rarely change as quickly or as dramatically as we expect them to.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Do you want to hear some really bad news? I mean dauntingly bad, horrifyingly bad, news so bad you could spend days or even weeks ruminating on it, worrying about it, desperately praying for it not to be true.

Are you ready? Here goes:

While you might have heard that the national debt in the United States is approaching $14 trillion, the actual unfunded liability of all American governments exceeds $125 trillion.

Stupefying, ain’t it?

And stupefying is precisely the right word, since news like that brings out the stupid in people. Nothing enervates the chicken in Chicken Little like a weather report predicting falling skies. If you find yourself in the business of selling advertising or shrieking treacly books or quack nostrums to Chicken Little, it behooves you to hire yourself some weathermen. Worked for Al Gore, didn’t it?

Am I being cynical? Not so much. Mainly I’m just being old.

I am an old libertarian. Not an old man, I hope, though of course I’m not getting any younger. But I have been a very radically committed libertarian since I was 19 years old, and an anarcho-capitalist since I was 24. I have been swimming in this ocean for 30 years, where many folks all over America are just now daring to wet their toes. I can defend the proposition that I am the first consistent theorist of both rational egoism and market anarchism, but, leaving that claim aside, it remains that I have been a libertarian for a long, long time.

Why does that matter? Because I’ve seen the gravely-predicted collapse of the starry firmament before. More than once. More than twice. More than a dozen times. It does seem plausible to me that the-world-as-we-know-it will someday come to an end. But with every passing day, I become more resolved in the belief that that day will not be tomorrow, regardless of the breathless weather reports.

It’s like this: New libertarians can be excitable. You’ve lived your whole life in an eyes-glazed-over sleep-walking state, and then, all at once, you wake up. The precipitant cause might be Atlas Shrugged or a John Stossel TV special or Read more

June 12, 2010

Reasons To Be Cheerful

by

Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

view from my back yard.jpg

For loads of reasons, I moved my family from what Greg once called the “tiny town of Westerville, OH,” to Gresham Oregon, a suburb of Portland.  I move into my rental house in a few days.  picture is what I see in my backyard.

My front yard is pine trees, and past that is a pristine view of Mount Hood. I crossed the plain in my minivan with my wife and kids, over 3 days–followed by my first vacation in years, a week in Manzanita Beach. We’ll do a 6 month stay in Gresham, and then figure out if Vancouver, WA is the mecca of tax avoidance that people say it is.

I have been delivered.

Now, I go back to work feverishly on the Sabbath, working like a dog to help my clients get what they want (and paid for).  I am joyful about the task at hand, my lists are set.

Many of you know (and I’ve never really hidden it).I have survived an ordeal, and I am happy because I’ve learned that I can’t be killed.   I can’t be extinguished.  I can get better faster than the government can harm me.  I took their best blow.  Yes, it hurt.  But I got tougher. They will never harm me.  And when  they try again, my stuff is together and I’m ready, and it will be a mere inconvenience, a half day’s work and a check to some Tax Attorney.

Like Martha Stewart before me, I had to maneuver in unpleasant ways.  I had to give plasma to keep the lights turned on 3 years ago. I wasn’t able to adorn my wife in the way that I’d like.   I joined the non prestigious Chapter 7 Society.  But I never broke, and I never said “do it to Julia.”

I’m guessing I’m not the only one.  I’m guessing that other people are shaking off the blows right now, learning that we can produce the income sufficient to pay for an extra house over a three year period in “the worst economy ever.”   Over 3 years, I paid what it would cost to buy a Read more

June 12, 2010

Reasons to be cheerful, part 0.5: Sleeping giants can’t sleep forever.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Do you want something to cheer about? Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom is the number one best-seller at Amazon.com right now:

It gets better. The Federalist Papers is at number fourteen.

I think a lot of people are annoyed that the free country they still remember clearly has somehow vanished right from under their noses. It’s very inspiring to see them searching for it so assiduously. My read is that this is very different from 1994…

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June 10, 2010

What a Young Sailor Teaches Us About Life

by

Realtor, Renaissance Man

Author website

This morning I woke up to read this article on Abby Sunderland, a young sailor, who is attempting an around the world sail singlehandedly. If you sail, then you know how dangerous this is, and as this article indicates, perhaps that danger has now placed Abby’s life in danger.

I grew up in Youngstown, Ohio, and never though much of sailing. While in college I read about a guy who had worked for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the largest newspaper in Cleveland, and who had managed to plan and sail the Atlantic Ocean in a boat that was just over 13 feet long…about the size of your car. His name was Robert Manry, and what he did influenced me to become a sailor when I found my way to San Diego some years later. Here’s a very short clip about his adventure.

But this story about Abby, a single day of which is recounted below from her blog, instructs us in the great adventure that awaits us every single day, doing the important, doing the mundane, living, longing, experiencing this opportunity to be the best we can be.

Thursday, May 27, 2010
A Tale from the Sea
Hey everyone,
Sorry it has been so long since I wrote. There were some problems with one of the Inmarsat satellites and so I wasn’t able to get online. That’s all sorted out now though and hopefully won’t happen again.

I have had a pretty busy past few days. Things went well getting out of Cape Town – everything was working well and I was having a lot of fun with my new auto pilot. I’ve been able to carry a lot more sail with the working auto pilot and making some pretty good speeds.

A few days ago (I’m sorry I don’t know exactly how long – the days started to blur together after awhile). I was sailing along nicely doing about 12-15 knots in perfect conditions. The wind started to pick up just as it was getting dark and was a bit too much for the sail I had up, so I went out to Read more

June 7, 2010

Per-capita wealth and poverty in a given political economy is strongly correlated both with economic freedom and oppression and with the perception of integrity or corruption among government officials.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Countries that pursue policies of economic freedom have rich populations. Countries that obstruct free enterprise have poor populations. The relative wealth or poverty of a given population is strongly correlated with and can be readily predicted from the level of economic oppression in that political economy. This is easily understood from Austrian and Classical economic theory, but it’s stunning to see how relentlessly the theory is borne out in the real-life experiences of the countries of the earth:

This map is from The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom.

Interestingly, relative wealth and poverty are also very fairly correlated with perceptions of the local population of the integrity or corruption of government officials.

This map is from Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index.

What’s especially striking is to look at the two maps together: Government corruption is correlated with economic oppression. This is not really surprising, but it seems to tell us everything we need to know about wealth and poverty: The closer a given country is to being a slave-state, the closer to starvation the people of that country will be.

June 6, 2010

The first word in “free enterprise” is “free” — how economic fallacies are deployed to frustrate human liberty.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

In a comment to my post on the NAR’s most recent attempts to rape the taxpayers, Michael Cook set forth a number of subtle economic fallacies. I am not picking on Michael. He is simply repeating Marxist propaganda that is ubiquitous, more’s the pity. But I thought it were well to take these claims apart, to illustrate how these kinds of fallacious arguments are used to frustrate human liberty. I’m taking this to a separate post because the comments thread on the original post is already wildly off topic.

So: Start here, quoting from Michael’s comment:

The very capitalist machine everyone here loves was bolstered by the use of slaves.

This is simply false, not alone simply by definition. The first word in “free enterprise” is “free.” Transactions in a free economy are always mutually-voluntary. If someone is being coerced, what is occurring is a crime, not an honest trade. Every modern economy we can speak of is in some way a form of socialism — a criminal conspiracy harnessing the power of the state to advantage certain people at the expense of the others. Slavery is of a piece with this pattern, although it predates modern economies by many millennia. Moreover, it was the free enterprise that was suffered to exist under modern Rotarian Socialist governments that finally rid the civilized world of chattel slavery. To be fair, this miracle was effected not by a moral awakening but simply because slavery is a lot less efficient than is investing wisely in fixed and human capital. In any case, slavery and free enterprise are mutually-exclusive phenomena.

History is wrought with takings back to the Egyptians, Roman and Greeks.

The same fallacious argument repeated, only this time with respect to land and portable wealth. Theft happens, but theft is not wealth creation. Consumable portable wealth quite literally turns into shit in no time. Mineral wealth and baubles can retain their exchange value, but these are static values. It is not possible to cultivate stolen gold or rubies. And stolen land or livestock is only productive of future wealth by means of intelligent husbandry.

Neither of these crimes — Read more

June 4, 2010

Unchained melody: Seven nights in Eire by Reckless Kelly

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The video is not just visually bereft, it’s also riven with misspellings. But the song is great fun, most appropriate for a Friday evening.

Here is a Pandora radio station built from the Reckless Kelly style of alt.country — rock ‘n’ roll instrumentation with rich saw-tooth voices lamenting intricately-detailed tragedies. This is what country music can and should be, when it’s not trying to sell beer and tampons. This is good art — pure, simple, brutal.

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

June 1, 2010

Field of Dreams – We Should Build It….They Will Come

by

Realtor, Renaissance Man

Author website

Teri’s probably sick to death with sports analogies, and even I openly make fun of sportscasters, especially during NFL season. This, however, is the stuff real estate dreams are made of. This is how I view the Bloodhound way.

This isn’t about technology.  It is about a dream of having such a great team, in such a wondrous setting, with such a foundational underpinning that fans, real estate fans, will travel and watch, listen and learn, return season after season, to a place they knew in their innocence, and think they had lost forever to the bush league players who have stolen the rights and traditions of what we love about real estate, homes, communities and the “family practitioners” who sat with us as true purveyors of that dream.

Imagine with me.

May 27, 2010

Ubiquitous Bloodhound finally makes his break

by

Realtor, Peripatetic Iconoclast

Author website

All of us, proprietors of this kennel included, have known that Odysseus was destined for the big time. Well, he finally got his break! Look for our pal anywhere a gorgeous face is needed.

It's midnight. Do you know where your Bloodhound is?

True confession: I was hiding in the bushes at a webinar (name withheld to protect the perps) and discovered PhotoFunia while waiting for the inevitable “buy today! Special deal just for our attendees! Super special deal if you get your broker to bring more lambs agents  to the slaughter!”  Well anyway, I found PhotoFunia at this webinar.  It is free and it is fun. There really was a pony in there!  I hope you enjoy.

May 26, 2010

Using Captcha to Capture Idiotic Real Estate Agents

by

Realtor, Renaissance Man

Author website

A CAPTCHA is a challenge-response test most often placed within web forms to determine whether the user is human. The purpose of CAPTCHA is to block form submissions by spambots, which are automated scripts that post spam content everywhere they can.

Somebody’s Got to Stop the Stupid

Okay, a bit of a rant.  But I’ll bet you’ll want to jump on the proverbial bandwagon once I’m exhausted, spent and fallen down in subluxed joy after finishing this. The outlet for my frustration came courtesy of a Facebook comment by Mary McKnight. “Thanks, Mary.”

If there’s one theme that Bloodhound blog has perpetuated, promulgated and promoted, it’s excellence. A close second would probably be splendor. Tom Johnson perhaps put his arms around what I’m about to rant a little over tonight, and he did it with this post about a famous Greek historical event.  The Spartans were professional soldiers. They studied their craft. They studied their history. They studied their enemy. They sought fellowship with one another, coupled by a sense of duty to excellence and splendor.

Oh, how I would that my compatriots in the profession of real estate were to embrace the Spartan ethos. And if not, at least an ethos. My encounters of late with real estate agents have left me thinking they lack not only a distinctive character, not only fundamental values, but simply a lack of any character, training or professionalism whatsoever.  In short, I’ve had my fill recently with agents who have no common sense, no commitment to excellence, no knowledge commensurate with their duties, no bleeping right to be called a professional real estate agent, and certainly no right to practice the longstanding legal requirements of agency.

I’ve had agents not call me back.  Then, then don’t call me back.   They tell me to sign contracts that they know have errors in them.  They provide inaccurate information to me about contracts they represent. They cant’ find documents. They can’t find the time to do what needs to be done. They can’t find their own assholes, honest. What they can Read more

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

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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

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