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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.

After your bingeing finale to 2007 you might want to exercise a bit, if you care about regenerating those brain cells that is. Wouldn’t want you to forget how to “deal with ambiguity.” I like that. They make alcohol related brain damage sound like some kind of existential psychosis.

Now on to my predictions for 2008:

1. More Republicans will be caught promoting “family values” in public restrooms, thereby inspiring the long awaited Log Cabin Republicans coup to take the GOP.
2. UBL will be brought to justice by Captain America (with possible assistance from Iron Man) and thereafter Iraq, the little democracy that could, will stabilize and flourish, quickly becoming the number one tourist destination on the planet. CNN’s Morgan Neill will be there to report it all, but will refuse to grow a beard to look “tougher.”
3. American football will be replaced by the ancient Mesoamerican ballgame, Ulama. Losers will be sacrificed. Dick Cheney will play some part in this.
4. Apple will release a product that no one knew they needed but quickly becomes seductively irresistible. Google will release “Google Sex” which allows users to upload their own “sex content” to share with friends and family.
5. All 80s throwback fashion trends will begin to give way to 90s throwback fashion trends. Yesterdays hipsters will begin to feel old.
6. The indoor helicopter craze will reach irrational heights as copters replace traditional pets.
7. Guerrilla open source hackers will replace abandoned pay phones with VOIP kiosks out of retro-nostalgic respect, yo.
8. Unintelligent people will continue to breed at an alarming rate. Intelligent people will continue to occasionally sleep with unintelligent people, for sport.
9. People will suddenly stop wearing sandals; Crocs will be made illegal.
10. Defective Real Doll prototypes will be secretly released into the population, creating an apocalyptic “Westworld” type situation (only much sexier), that only reincarnated Real Doll Yul Brenner can save us from.
11. Georgia will move to number 1 in national housing foreclosures and retain its championship in bank robberies. I predict some spectacular “Point Break” style bank robberies in Atlanta.
12. A new president will be elected. No matter who it is Americans will feel relief for a few weeks.

I spent Thanksgiving as I usually do, with family, all of whom live nearby. This year it was at my parents house in Woodstock. I have never hosted a holiday dinner, since being single and with no “responsibilities” means there are no familial expectations demanded of me. I don’t wrap presents, or if I do, they are wrapped with newspapers and duct tape. Not having endorsed/validated the family idea yet, by creating my own, I’m simply not liable. Those game rules do not apply. But I still love to parasite off the holiday meal trough: vegetables of any sort to counter a not very nutritional bachelor’s diet. Plus they pity me like a hobo, or rather, an utterly, incomprehensibly free man.

This year we managed to talk about politics at the dinner table without anyone having an embarrassing explosion. It was strange. Of course, we’ve all changed over the years… I hardly ever read The Nation, and my father has either hidden or thrown away the signed photo of George and Laura Bush. Although while his disenchantment is real, I don’t think he’d ever vote for a Democrat. In fact, one thing everyone seemed to agree on was the ineptness of the Bush administration. Hardly news these days, it’s downright boring to catalog the many wrong turns of Dubya. It’s so bad no one cares…we’ve all gone hopelessly apathetic. But we also agreed that we didn’t like many of the candidates for the next go around, but then disagreed on our projections of the inevitable Clinton vs. Giuliani deathmatch. I brought up Ron Paul and thought it was interesting that while everyone claimed to “like him,” no one takes him seriously as a contestant for American Idol: President. I thought depressingly to myself that America is not ready to talk about fiat money or blowback, that despite our losses they have not been great enough as to have us question the actual status quo itself. We still prefer the popularity contest, the confetti, some “tough talk” on terror, millions of dollars wasted in ads and marketing, and some juicy wedge issues thrown in just to keep the culture wars exciting, and everyone distracted.

Another good BBC documentary. Sartre…philosopher, playa. That picture of him with Robert Plant hair as a child kills me.

Have not checked out one of my favorite libertarian screed sites in quite some time…Sheldon Richman asks in War is a Government Program:

So why aren’t people who claim to be suspicious of other government programs suspicious of war? I can see only two reasons, neither of them flattering: power lust or nationalistic zeal.

I’ve always thought the warfare – welfare connection is something Republicrats have deliberately failed to comprehend.

War is useful in keeping the population in a state of fear and therefore trustful of their rulers. H.L. Mencken said it well: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

Word. Call me a hobgoblinphobe.

Finally on the bureaucracy enabling aspects of war he quotes Madison:

Most unappreciated of all is that war is the midwife of intrusive bureaucracy. James Madison understood this. “Of all the enemies of true liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few…. No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

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 implementation of capital punishment is flawed, both morally and logically. Everyone understands the emotions of revenge, no matter how self-serving and ultimately futile they are. We’re human after all. The problem is that the legal system kills and jails innocent people at staggering numbers. So revenge comes at the price of further innocent death. Ironic vicious circle, anyone?

As many have argued, why would you put the government, who can’t even fix holes in roads, in charge of deciding who lives or dies? The result of course, is that our legal system has put many innocent people to death, and locked many thousands more away. This is the moral contradiction CP supporters just can’t get around. Supporting capital punishment, is supporting a system that has jailed and put to death thousands of innocent people. That’s where the Innocence Project comes in, working with DNA evidence to exonerate the thousands of wrongly convicted. As you can imagine, death row gets priority.

There’s a good and quite emotional documentary on The Innocence Project, called After Innocence. Highly recommended on awareness raising factor alone. It’ll haunt you. It should haunt you…depending on your state, your tax money kills innocent people.

Not really surprising that out of the 2008 Presidential Candidates the Democrats are leading what in my estimation is the most important polling metric, the Myspace friend count. Democrats have always been slightly hipper…or had more time to waste on Myspace.

Barak Obama 113270
Hilary Clinton 50364
John Edwards 40566

Now what is really surprising is that Ron Paul, a libertarian running as a Republican, is nowhere on the “official” polls, but hugely popular on the internet. I thought it odd that McCain was ahead of him but then realized the McCain-Myspace debacle of a few months ago probably got McCain a lot of unintentional “friends,” fudging the numbers. Plus, Paul is smoking McCain on Facebook, which might say something interesting about younger voters, and he has more Youtube and Meetup subscribers than any other candidate, Elephant or Donkey. “Dr. No” as supporters lovingly refer to him, is definitely getting the Howard Dean style grass-roots-internet-monster momentum going. Good thing we all know how that can turn out.

John McCain 37451
Ron Paul 33904
Mitt Romney 25273
Fred Thompson 6070
Rudy Guliani (profile set to private!)

Politicar2, originally uploaded by anewvoice.

Ron Paul will never win the Republican nomination because he’s too mild mannered and rational to win the Big-Dumb-War-Fox-News-Gay-Hater party nomination. The “conservative” party has come to mean anything but, and they should be ashamed of it. Might I suggest Seppuku, losers? If he had a little more fire in him I think he might have a chance, but I’m afraid that the reality of it is that the presidency is still just another American Idol variant.

“When the zombies get out of hand…”