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I like money, mostly because it buys ice cream and pills. But I just figured something out. The US government is trying to buy all of the bad debt in the universe in order to save us from annihilation, because they love us so much. What that translates to is that beginning next month, everyone can stop paying their mortgage! The precedent is being set…if your debt is bad, someone else will pay it. Capitalism is magic that way.

Also, before paper money becomes totally useless, you might want to convert what’s left of your cash and bad debts to facebook money. Facebook has taken off and will clearly be the successor to US monetary policy, when that system collapses in a month or so. Think about getting set up in Second Life too, so that when you lose your job and house in ‘Real Life’ you will at least have something.

It’s been virtual…

Why regulation is stoopid.

It’s tempting to believe that government regulation of the Internet would be more consumer-friendly; history and economics suggest otherwise. The reason is simple: a regulated industry has a far larger stake in regulatory decisions than any other group in society. As a result, regulated companies spend lavishly on lobbyists and lawyers and, over time, turn the regulatory process to their advantage.

Via the libertarian aware Onion:

WASHINGTON—A panel of top business leaders testified before Congress about the worsening recession Monday, demanding the government provide Americans with a new irresponsible and largely illusory economic bubble in which to invest.
…
The current economic woes, brought on by the collapse of the so-called “housing bubble,” are considered the worst to hit investors since the equally untenable dot-com bubble burst in 2001. According to investment experts, now that the option of making millions of dollars in a short time with imaginary profits from bad real-estate deals has disappeared, the need for another spontaneous make-believe source of wealth has never been more urgent.

End of the world hedge funds? Cool. Apocalypse investing… Armageddon insurance…a whole new way to look at diversifying your portfolio. I was thinking about gold but this is much more interesting.

I became intrigued by an oddity that I came to think of as the end-of-the-world trade. The trade is the purchase of insurance against what would in effect be the failure of the modern capitalist system. It would take a cataclysm – around a third of the leading investment-grade corporations in Europe or half those in North America going bankrupt and defaulting on their debt – for the insurance to be paid out.

While I want to believe in such simple truths as the government always gets it wrong, plain old statistics wouldn’t support me. Even the government could theoretically get something right…by chance.

The latest libertarian leaning criticism of government is blaming the government for the subprime crisis, particularly, the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977. Sounds reasonable at first glance:

But to earn high ratings, banks were forced to make increasingly risky loans to borrowers who wouldn’t qualify for a mortgage under normal standards of creditworthiness. The Community Reinvestment Act, made even more stringent during the Clinton administration, trapped lenders in a Catch-22.

But perhaps this is exaggerated to lay blame on the government when in fact it’s much more complicated than that.

Most analysts see the sub-prime crisis as a market failure. Believing the bubble would never pop, lenders approved risky adjustable-rate mortgages, often without considering whether borrowers could afford them; families took on those loans; investors bought them in securitized form; and, all the while, regulators sat on their hands.

Second, it is hard to blame CRA for the mortgage meltdown when CRA doesn’t even apply to most of the loans that are behind it. As the University of Michigan’s Michael Barr points out, half of sub-prime loans came from those mortgage companies beyond the reach of CRA. A further 25 to 30 percent came from bank subsidiaries and affiliates, which come under CRA to varying degrees but not as fully as banks themselves. (With affiliates, banks can choose whether to count the loans.) Perhaps one in four sub-prime loans were made by the institutions fully governed by CRA.

Somewhere in the misty lands of corporate america, a building super is getting tough on smoking. Because that’s your job in a bureaucracy, making everyone else’s job more difficult. I’m not really kidding. Management has to justify their existence.

Smoking – Smoking is permitted in the designated area in the lower deck where the benches and ash trays are provided. Please remain in the smoking area and not in the pathway of oncoming traffic. Smoking is prohibited in the front of the buildings, in front of handicap parking, inside the parking decks, at the bottom of the hill and on top of the parking deck landing. We are receiving complaints that people are walking through smoke to get to their cars. Please do not use the old planters, grassy areas, pine straw and rocked areas to extinguish your cigarettes. Please use the designated smoking area only.

Update: this is not related to the cigarette smokers problem.

Who could have guessed Tuesday’s turnout!?! OMG, what an unpredictable world we live in! The Socialist Lady and the Endless War guy. Fuuuuuck me. Oh the sweet choices Democracy has laid before us yet again.

If you think I’m being facetious, get yourself a beer.

Say what you will about Ron Paul, the man made a mark, and if he runs for the election as an independent, he’ll make an even bigger one. I’ve never seen more steet signs and freaking airplanes and, good god, the Ron Paul meet-up emails in my inbox. But alas, the United States is not ready to mix reason with politics. It still prefers dynasty and fear, and the shit-sturm und drang of empty rhetorical pandering, to boring sound argument.

I’m not crazy about all of RP’s positions. I don’t agree with his stance on abortion, or his hard-line views on immigration or even his seductive yet somewhat over-simplified foreign policy (considering the mess we’ve made for ourselves is one we ought to atone for in my book.) But I think he’s got more of a coherent vision of the proper role of government in the United States according to its original charter (hint: think smaller) , than any other candidate. Government is too big, too intrusive, and has proven time and time again that it does not work. Both parties have lost sight of this.

Fans of utopia will chide me for being so simplistic. They will say “Don’t be so naive. Government can fix anything- it just has to be done in the right way.” This is the core fallacy of the modern status quoticians: the belief in a top-down, self-engineered utopia delivered by a big shiny government to your doorstep for free. Energy issues? Let them eat ethanol. Poverty? Just raise the minimum wage, and we’ll all become rich. Terrorism? Just start toppling rogue governments halfway across the world. Blowback? What blowback? At best, the idea that the powerful government can solve all of our woes, is misguided. At worst, it has brought us war, broken and unethical wealth redistribution schemes, disastrous protectionism and other economic meddling, and unconstitutional invasions of privacy (wiretapping, drug policy.) All of these scenarios have one thing in common: the oft ignored hidden consequences that are birthed by the “noble” intentions of government.

When Ron Paul talked about “blowback” he was lauded by both the left and right for making a connection that few politicians dared make. Why stop there? Blowback, mostly in the form of unintended consequences, is visible in all government policies. Prohibition put small business out and strengthened organized crime, just like the drug war today creates international crime and puts money in terrorists hands. The creation of the unnecessary Homeland Security bureaucracy contributed to the ineffective handling of Katrina. The training of the Mujahideen led to the rise of the Taliban and you know what.

This is not to say that government can’t ever get it right, just that usually it doesn’t, and that its actions often end up causing more harm than good. Furthermore, when government meddles we never get to see how people and markets and society adjust to a problem naturally. Patience! Economic stimulus plans are naive, needed pain is just put off until tomorrow. But we’ve grown so accustomed to the government “doing something” that we erroneously think of it as a physician. All of the leading candidates just sprinkle promises of money and programs and war to fix everything. They promise what they can’t deliver and it’s that false hope that gets them elected.

America is on the greatest crack bender ever.

Factcheck.org gettin all meta-psychological on our ass. Now I’ve been a pious fan of research cherry-picking watchdog groups for about as long I’ve been politically aware and internet enabled, and perhaps therein lies part of the problem, one man’s statistically sound study, another man’s crock-full-a…

But Factcheck, who remain all too infrequent and obscure, contemplate the mind-bending proposition that perhaps de-obscuring the truth just leads to further obscuring, by way of a complex pattern of downwardly spiraling retardation, which manifests itself mainly in dumb people. While I agree with the premise, which is that most people who walk upright and get occasional haircuts are intellectually not much further along than the Bonobo, but do we have to draw attention to it? Perhaps they should go the logical step further and simply pronounce that, “all I know is that I know nothing.”

That’s the end game.

Now, even if you don’t believe the government should be involved in public education or health care, this is still money that could be spent elsewhere. In other words, it’s your money, beeyatch! Wake up! See “What $1.2 Trillion Can Buy.” Imagine if this money had been spent on national defense? We could have one of those utopian missile defense programs or even individual apocalypse-proof bubble suits. I’m more in favor of the latter, as it allows for travel.

The Yes Men, with some alternative energy sources…