February 15, 2006
The Ever-Widening Smoking Ban
The concept of public smoking bans, in my opinion, really gives you an insight into the psyche of a person. This is one of those issues that really separates those who believe in smaller-government-enforcing-their-own-biases from those who truly believe in smaller government and private property rights. I see a true protector of private property rights in a guy like Doug, of Below the Beltway. Doug doesn’t like smoke, to the point where being around it even makes him ill. But he doesn’t accept the idea of government forcing businesses to change the terms of business on their own property. Despite what the Virginia Senate has to say about it:
Nonetheless, this is the closest Virginia has come to banning smoking in any form and it does not bode well for the future. One or two elections more, and the fate of a bill like this in the House of Delegates could be quite different. And the breadth and scope of the proposed ban is really quite extraordinary:
The Virginia ban would include banks, bars, educational facilities, health care facilities, hotel and motel lobbies, laundromats, public transportation, reception areas, retail food production and marketing establishments, retail services establishments, retail stores, shopping malls, sports arenas, theaters and waiting rooms. Hotels could also set aside no more than 25 percent of their rooms for smokers.
Outside of an ocassional cigar, I am not, and never have been, a smoker. Cigarette smoke in particular makes me ill and, in a restaurant, I generally prefer to sit in the non-smoking section. That doesn’t mean, though, that I believe that I or anyone else in the Commonwealth has the right to tell a restaurant or bar owner that they shouldn’t be permitted to make a choice to allow or ban smoking in their establishment. If there really is increasing support for smoking restrictions, then restaurants and bars that don’t allow it should do just fine. At the same time, though, a business owner who chooses to have a smoking section in their restaurant or allow smoking at their bar should be permitted to do so.
But not everyone takes this view. Oddly, many who oppose government restriction in other areas are just loving this. After all, for many non-smokers, it is a constant annoyance to be in a restaurant or bar filled with smoke. For me, actually, as an ex-smoker, I’m always surprised now when I enter a smoke-filled bar at just how much I hate it. But I contrast Doug’s reaction, and my own, with this thread at beeradvocate.com.
Beeradvocate.com is the first place where I heard about freethehops.org, the web site devoted to ending Alabama’s prohibition on beers above 6% ABV. And I’d say, to a person, that the members of beeradvocate.com would reject the notion that it is the government’s place to determine what percentage alcohol should be in the beer an individual buys. Of course, they don’t say they’d like to force liquor stores to carry high-alcohol beers. But they want them to have the option, if the purveyor of the establishment so chooses.
But a large portion of them don’t offer bar owners the same choice. They’re more than happy to decree what a bar owner must allow and not allow in his bar, because smoking offends their personal sensibilities. The government stepping in to do something they don’t like (restricting beer sales) is offensive. But the government stepping in, doing the same basic thing, to restrict a behavior they disapprove of is no problem.
There is a dividing line between conservatives and libertarians, and this is one of the markers between the two. Non-smoking conservatives are usually quick to denounce smokers, and love the idea of smoking bans, because it stops people from engaging in behavior they disagree with. Non-smoking libertarians, on the other hand, may hate walking into smoke-filled bars, but understand that it is the decision of the bar owner to make. We don’t always like the results of freedom, but to a libertarian, the alternative of oppression– even well-meaning oppression– is unacceptable.
Committees of Correspondence linked with Carnival of Liberty 34
February 14, 2006
Microsoft & the Market Monopoly
As promised in my last post, I’ll post below the email exchange between myself and a friend. Of all my friends, she is one of the two that I truly enjoy debating. She’s a lawyer, and did her undergrad as an in economics & poli sci (I think poli sci) dual major. She was also very close to libertarianism back in her younger days, so she understands where I’m arguing from. She’s left our fold to become a pretty strong liberal, but her knowledge of economics and general pragmatic attitude generally make our debates quite productive.
I sent out an email today to alert friends & acquantances of my email address change. I’m changing for no other reason than Microsoft’s deliberate efforts to annoy FireFox users, and as a former Hotmail user, I was feeling the brunt of those efforts. In past debates, we’ve often sparred about Microsoft’s monopoly power, and monopolies in general, so she used my email as a reason to start a sparring match. Not being one to back down, I took the bait, and I think the exchange was pretty strong on both sides. When I asked her approval to post the exchange, I offered her the ability to have the last word (and unlike Bill O’Reilly, I will stand by that offer). So I don’t plan to address her final points in my post, although if my commenters would like to have a go, I may play along.
Below is the exchange. I’ve tried to clean up some of the spelling errors and typos along the way, as this was intended as an email exchange and not proofread during the debate. If I missed anything, my apologies. My comments will be in italics, and prefaced with a “B:”. Her comments will be blockquoted, bolded, and prefaced with an “R:”. The exchange is placed below the fold, as it’s quite lengthy.
The Unrepentant Individual linked with Dell to offer Linux OS
Carnival of Liberty XXXII
The Carnival of Liberty XXXII is up at New World Man.
I got into a fun email debate today about Microsoft and monopoly power (after sending friends an announcement about my email account switch). Assuming I get approval from the other participant to post the contents, I’ll try to do that today.
February 13, 2006
Hotmail vs. Firefox
Just a quickie… In Hotmail, I find that when I’m reading a message in my inbox, and hit “delete”, it deletes the email, marks the next one down as having been read, but takes me to the first message in the inbox. It’s freakishly annoying, and I don’t remember it doing it to me when I used IE (or IE-powered Maxthon).
I’m wondering: is this just me, or do other people run into the same thing? Is this something that Microsoft does to screw with Firefox users? Or am I just being paranoid?
I know I’m getting sick and tired of it, and the only thing that’s keeping me from switching to any other system is the inertia of having had this email address for so many years that I get too much mail here. But if this is a Microsoft issue, I might have to change to another system just to spite them.
Framing the Debate Properly
Jay Tea of Wizbang had a flash in the middle of the night about Cartoongate. Specifically, he realized that nobody is asking the right question here. Everyone is focusing on whether or not printing the cartoons is “sensitive” enough, or whether, even with the rights of free speech, whether it was in good taste.
But that’s not the idea at all. Muslims are not rioting because they’re “offended”. They’re rioting because a tenet of Islamic law, disallowing one to depict the prophet Muhammed (gfap) in drawings, has been violated.
As Jay Tea points out, this isn’t a question of whether it’s in good taste to print those cartoons, it is a question of whether or not we submit to following Islamic law:
There’s been something that has been bugging me about the Cartoon War, some aspect that was just wrong, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Finally, while I slept last night, it clicked in my head — the fundamental question that so few seem to be addressing:
Do we have the right to not obey Islamic law?
As civilized, decent human beings, we certainly are obligated to take into account the sensibilities of others when we decide whether or not to take certain actions that may offend them. Indeed, that is the crux of the argument of the apologists, and it is a valid argument.
But the power of that argument — as persuasive as it may be — ends at the point of compulsion. We SHOULD respect them, and SHOULD consider them, but is has no duty assigned to it.
The Islamist world is not inflamed over a dozen cartoons published by a single newspaper in Denmark. (To be perfectly honest, they’re more inflamed by three counterfeit cartoons passed off as legit by a group of Danish Imams than the original Dirty Dozen, but that’s irrelevant to this point.) They are outraged because that newspaper carefully considered whether or not to respect Islamic law, and chose not to. Following that, the Danish government considered whether or not to enforce Islamic law against the newspaper — and came to the conclusion that they could not.
Let’s not forget that the ultimate goal of the jihadists is the worldwide spread of Islam and Islamic law. Where they cannot yet directly bring about submission to Islamic law, they hope to bring it about through the threat of terrorism. Whether or not the cartoons are insensitive is not the issue here: standing up for freedom in the face of those who wish to enslave us is.
Imported Old Posts
Wordpress 2.0 is very, very nice. It has an automatic “import” feature for bringing posts and comments in from other systems, and as you can see if you check out my archives from April 2005 and older, they’re now finally integrated into my Wordpress theme. It even brought comments, but since I was using Haloscan for my trackbacks, those did not come along. Oh well, I doubt anyone’s really worried about trackbacks from a year ago.
If you guys happen to see any problems looking through the archives (other than a billion spam comments that Blogger didn’t catch, because Blogger sucks), let me know. And I haven’t really updated the “Favorite Posts” section in a long time, although I’ve been meaning to. If you know of any posts you readers particularly enjoyed, let me know and I’ll try to put those up there.
February 12, 2006
Close Enough for Government Work
Ind. House Wrongly Valued at $400 Million
A house erroneously valued at $400 million is being blamed for budget shortfalls and possible layoffs in municipalities and school districts in northwest Indiana.
An outside user of Porter County’s computer system may have triggered the mess by accidentally changing the value of the Valparaiso house, said Sharon Lippens, director of the county’s information technologies and service department. The house had been valued at $121,900 before the glitch.
…
Lippens said her agency identified the mistake and told the county auditor’s office how to correct it. But the $400 million value ended up on documents that were used to calculate tax rates.
Most local officials did not learn about the mistake until Tuesday, when 18 government taxing units were asked to return a total of $3.1 million of tax money. The city of Valparaiso and the Valparaiso Community School Corp. were asked to return $2.7 million. As a result, the school system has a $200,000 budget shortfall, and the city loses $900,000.
Wow… I wonder how many people are going to get fired for this little oversight. After all, if I cause my employer to lose a couple million dollars, I think I’ll be looking for work. But then, when I consider that it’s the government, I realize that nobody will get fired. And in the fight over this money, it’ll probably end up being the taxpayers that feel the pain of this little bungle.
A Stitch in Haste linked with Assessment Error Causes Tax Shortfall
Cheney: Keeping us safe from Al Qaeda
… or something like that.
Cheney Accidentally Shoots Fellow Hunter
Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot and wounded a companion during a weekend quail hunting trip in Texas, spraying the fellow hunter in the face and chest with shotgun pellets.
Harry Whittington, a millionaire attorney from Austin, was “alert and doing fine” in a Corpus Christi hospital Sunday after he was shot by Cheney on a ranch in south Texas, said Katharine Armstrong, the property’s owner.
Cheney was reported to follow up the shooting with a pleasant “Go f*** yourself.”
Thankfully, nobody was seriously wounded.
“It broke the skin,” she said of the shotgun pellets. “It knocked him silly. But he was fine. He was talking. His eyes were open. It didn’t get in his eyes or anything like that.”
“Fortunately, the vice president has got a lot of medical people around him and so they were right there and probably more cautious than we would have been,” she said. “The vice president has got an ambulance on call, so the ambulance came.”
Yep… The benefit of hanging out with someone who’s on constant heart attack watch is if he accidentally shoots you, you’ve got medical staff at the ready!
Man, I’m going to have to watch The Daily Show now… I can only imagine the fun they’ll have with this.
February 11, 2006
The Stars of Marietta
Part of the benefit of living in beautiful Marietta, GA, is the movie, TV, and music stars who you run into on a daily basis…
Or maybe not. But since we’ve been here, my wife noticed a member of the Backstreet Boys out at our local steakhouse one night, and tonight we made the real sighting– Alton Brown. As we were walking into the grocery store, he and a friend were leaving, carrying a couple of six-packs of good beer.
I could have easily said hello. After all, I found out a while ago that Alton rides the same motorcycle that I used to have, and it was his TV show that got my interest piqued to start home-brewing. Of the Food Network shows, Good Eats is definitely my favorite (and the favorite of nearly every engineer I know). My wife, who is the true Food Network fan amongst us, was walking around the other side of the car and didn’t notice, or she surely would have said hello.
But, being the type that I am, I know that if I were a celebrity, I wouldn’t want random fans bothering me outside the local grocery store. So, if Alton Brown randomly googles his name, he might see that one fan really wanted to say hello and didn’t. And, I can always hope that perhaps he reads this blog, and didn’t say hello for the same reasons I didn’t 
February 10, 2006
Taking Aim at Craigslist
Craigslist Accused of Ad Discriminating
A federal lawsuit accuses the online site Craigslist of violating fair housing laws by publishing discriminatory classified ads, reviving the question of what legal boundaries, if any, should exist for postings on the Internet.
But legal experts say the lawsuit against Craigslist, a fast-growing online network of classified ads and forums, faces an uphill battle because of laws in place to protect online service providers.
The lawsuit, filed by a Chicago fair housing group in U.S. District Court last Friday, contends that Craigslist’s Chicago site distributed more than 100 ads that violated the federal Fair Housing Act by excluding prospective buyers or tenants on the basis of race, gender or religion.
Now, I’m not going to launch into my typical sort of libertarian tirade. You know, the one where someone who owns property should be able to determine who they do and do not rent to on whatever basis they find reasonable. Because you know in the real world, someone who wants to discriminate is just going to find another way around something like this.
What bothers me is that people are trying to use old rules to deal with new systems. And if the rules are applied in the same way, it will destroy the new systems.
“Our goal is to have the Internet places like Craigslist treated no differently than newspapers and other media who have traditionally been posting real estate advertisements,” said Stephen Libowsky, a counsel for the housing group. “All of the gains are going to get lost if the same rules don’t apply.”
…
The lawsuit seeks, among other things, to require Craigslist to report to the government any individual seeking to post a discriminatory ad and to develop screening software to preclude discriminatory ads from being published on its Web site.
It all sounds reasonable. Until, of course, you start to realize what makes Craigslist what it is. Craigslist is yet another nail in the coffin of print newspapers, because it does what they do– classified ads– for free. It’s easy. Right now the wife and I have a car for sale. We’ve gotten three people to come to look at it who found the Craigslist ads. We have none from AutoTrader. I’ve bought and sold items advertised on Craigslist. I’ve found places to live and found people to sublet an old apartment through Craigslist.
It’s one of the the simplest things to do in the world. You don’t need to know the first thing about computers to put up an ad. If you know barely enough to download pictures from your camera to your PC, you can put up ads with pictures. And the best part– if I must repeat myself– IT’S FREE!
How do they do it? By doing things a little bit differently from the newspapers. For one thing, Craigslist has 19 employees. For another, they don’t have ads flying all over the place. In their three premier cities, they do earn some ad income, and that pays all the bills. In every other market they’re in, it’s ad-free.
The sort of active management that this lawsuit would require can’t really be accomplished by 19 employees. That means they need more staff. More staff means more money. More money means more ads, or as a last resort, ceasing to allow free postings. And that’s the end of Craigslist.
It’s not like they’re doing nothing, of course. They do have procedures in place to keep this partly in check, and they’ve made changes when necessary:
Craigslist, which has 19 employees, maintains that screening its almost-nonstop classified listings would be impossible. Jim Buckmaster, its chief executive officer, said Thursday that the system is automated and that users can flag postings. If enough do, it comes off automatically. The “NO MINORITIES” ad was removed within two hours, he said.
“We admit that one or two postings per 100,000 are discriminatory,” Buckmaster said. “But we feel we’re in the forefront of promoting fair housing for everyone.”
The site last month added a yellow link on each housing ad warning that “Stating a discriminatory preference in a housing post is illegal.” When clicked, users get information about the Fair Housing Act and guidance on how to write ads that comply.
It’s not much, of course, to automatically take down postings flagged by other users for inappropriate content, or to throw up a warning here and there. But frankly, Craigslist doesn’t actively do much of anything for their customers. All they do is offer the service. But it appears that one of the inappropriate ads was quite short-lived, and they’re making some effort to let users know what the legal requirements are in housing ads.
But to treat Craigslist like you would a normal newspaper classified is not right, because Craigslist is far removed from the world of newspaper classifieds. To place a newspaper ad, you must contact the newspaper, submit your text (along with payment), that text must be reviewed, approved, added into the typeset system, and printed. The workflow is such that having ads approved by a human (or by software) makes sense. Craigslist is a system almost completely devoid of interaction by its staff, as it is intended to be. That is what makes it the powerful tool it is, but at the same time, causes its own flaws and headaches.
If you want to apply old laws to new systems, the first step is understanding that there are differences between the old and new systems. Just as trying to apply telephone harassment laws to the internet and blogs doesn’t make any real sense, trying to apply laws regarding published content to a web site that only offers a forum for users takes special consideration. At least one guy gets it:
“From a moral standpoint, of course, people will expect that if you’re going to run a site like that you ought to police it,” said Houston-based attorney Jeff Diamant. “But all Craigslist is doing is running a forum for people to communicate.”
February 9, 2006
More Blue Law Stupidity
Between trying to outlaw kegs and this nonsense, I’m glad I don’t live in Alabama…
Free The Hops | Alabamians For Specialty Beer
Help us Free The Hops!
Alabama is one of only four states in the country that limits alcohol by volume (ABV) for beer to only 6%, and the only state that limits beer containers to a size of no more than 1 pint (16 American ounces).
As statewide Prohibition came to end in Alabama, the only politically viable avenue open to those who wanted the sale of alcohol to once again be legal in the state was to place heavy restrictions on that sale. What, when, where, and how alcohol could be sold were all strictly controlled by the legislation which legalized alcohol sales in Alabama—four years after National Prohibition was repealed.
…
The ABV Limit
The 6% ABV limit excludes approximately 1/3 of the world’s beer styles, some of them the finest, highest quality beverages on earth. Entire styles of specialty beers fall above this limitation, such as barleywine, a strong ale with a typical ABV between 8-13%. Barleywines are elegant and expensive, sometimes cellared and aged for years like a fine Cabernet. Another elite group of beers, those brewed by Trappist Monks in Belgium (considered by many to be the greatest beer in the world) is comprised almost entirely of beers above 6% ABV. These “Dubbels†and “Trippels†are currently illegal in Alabama.
The Container Limit
Though it is impossible to quantify exactly how many other beers are excluded by the 1 pint limit, it is safe to say that many more fine beers are unavailable to Alabamians due to this additional restriction. For example, Rogue Ales—one of the most notable craft breweries in the United States—sells most of their beer in 22 ounce bottles. Only 5 of their 25 core beers fall within Alabama’s ABV and container size restrictions. Furthermore, many beers from Europe (such as those of Young’s Brewery in England) are only exported in 500 mL or 750 mL bottles—too big for Alabama.
Of the Top 100 beers at BeerAdvocate.com, 98 aren’t found anywhere in this state.
Until mid-2004, Georgia also had this law. Had I moved here while that was in effect, I very well may have had to move back to CA. When does it finally occur to people that perhaps it’s not the state government’s job to decide things such as this?
There’s a well-known liquor/beverage store here in Atlanta called Green’s, renowned for their specialty beer selection. Apparently they get a lot of business from AL and SC residents (S. Carolina being one of the other states with this restriction), who are in the area, buying beers unavailable in their home state. As mentioned above, an enormous selection of high-quality brews are excluded by these two restrictions. In fact, many of my personal favorites (such as Arrogant Bastard Ale and many Belgian Tripels) would not be available.
Why? As the writer of this site points out here, it’s not like the “it’s for the children” argument even holds water. Underage drinkers are not looking for a 750 ml bottle of Grand Cru at 10% alcohol to catch their buzz, they’re looking for a case of Keystone Light as cheap as they can get it.
This law is simply unnecessary meddling in individual affairs. It serves no real “public safety” purpose. It’s not even a moral issue, as Alabama allows the sale of liquor that is much, much more potent than these specialty beers. When I start railing against the stupidity of restricting alcohol purchases on Sunday here in Georgia, I only have to look a little westward to see how bad it truly could be.
The Liberty Papers»Blog Archive linked with The Ever-Widening Smoking Ban
Spin Cycle
I still utilize Wikipedia as an information source for certain non-controversial things, but this sort of thing reminds me why it’s not smart to consult it for political topics:
When Marty Meehan first ran for office, he pledged to serve just eight years or four terms.
It seems he — or people in his inner circle — want that pesky fact to go away, now that the powerful congressman has about 14 years in the saddle and $4.8 million stuffed into his campaign war chest.
Staffers for U.S. Rep. Marty Meehan recently acknowledged they deleted unflattering information about the congressman from Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia.
…
Matt Vogel, chief of staff for Meehan, a Lowell Democrat, said he authorized an intern last year to replace existing Wikipedia content with a staff-written biography of the lawmaker.
The change, made by the intern last July, deleted a reference to Meehan’s campaign promise to surrender his seat after serving eight years.
It also deleted a reference to Meehan’s fat campaign account, which at the time was the biggest in the House.
…
The pre-edited entry contains unflattering information, certainly, but is also neutrally worded.
“Meehan first ran for Congress in 1992 on a platform of reform,” it read. “As part of that platform Meehan made a pledge to not serve more than four terms, a central part of his campaign. This breaking of the pledge has been a controversial issue in the 5th Congressional district of Massachusetts.”
The Meehan-approved version reads in part: “Meehan was elected to Congress in 1992 on a plan to eliminate the deficit. His fiscally responsible voting record since then has earned him praise from citizen watchdog groups. He was re-elected by a large margin in 2004.”
Of course, keeping campaign promises is not something I expect from elected officials. It’s nice when they do it, of course, but past experience has shown me that it’s nothing to rely upon. That being said, for a politician to actively try to delete references to their own broken campaign promises is a new low.
I’m not one to scream “free speech!” whenever a point of view is not published by private individuals or companies, but it certainly seems that Congressional staffers deleting Wikipedia references to their bosses, on taxpayer time, could be a pretty bad precedent to set. This would be a worthwhile place for Wikipedia or citizens of Lowell, MA (whoever would have standing to bring suit) to challenge this in court as a violation of the First Amendment.
What do you guys think? Is a lawsuit over the line on this one?
February 8, 2006
Playing with Linux
As I mentioned yesterday, blogging has been light. I’ve been struggling with my little home project. I’m turning an unused PC in the house into a DVR, and on Eric’s urging (and because I’m a glutton for punishment), I decided to make it a Linux project. I need to become more familiar with Linux for work, so it sounded like a good idea.
Well, I’ve learned a lot more than I ever intended, and a great deal of it was considerably harder than I expected. It started with the hell of enabling TV-out on the free ATI video card that I acquired. 1 week of the project was spent arguing with this, and eventually I scrapped the idea and simply moved to a newer version of Linux. Two days later, I got the TV-out working, after spending a day learning how to completely recompile a patched version of X. While trying to get everything else up (including my Hauppauge TV capture card), I suddenly lost my graphical interface completely, which took most of tonight to recover. Now, I’m nearly there, but still need to figure out LIRC for my remote…
Here is the current look… I think I’m getting close!
What have I really learned so far? Linux is the best operating system in the world, if you’re a power user. If not, it’s not quite ready for prime time. Now, I know Eric is going to take me to task for this, and in some ways, I understand where he’s coming from. After all, neither Eric nor I wants to use a computer like Microsoft wants us to. As he says, we want to be grown-up computer users.
But I’m in the minority. I home-brew beer. Am I unhappy with the beer I buy at the store? Of course not! I’ve tasted some absolutely wonderful beers, that I may never come close to equalling. But I like the idea of brewing my own beer simply because I can make beer the way I want my beer to be made. It’s the same way with a computer. Even on a Windows PC, I like things to be set up certain ways, because I know the ins and outs of a PC and can configure it to make it meet my needs, and to make me more productive.
But most people are perfectly content to use their computer the way Microsoft intended. They don’t even think about doing it differently, because they’re not interested in making choices. Just as I don’t do anything to “personalize” my car, or spend obscene amounts of time building my wardrobe, they don’t want to spend time changing their computing environment. They’re completely comfortable with Windows, Internet Explorer, and Microsoft Office. Why? Because Microsoft (like Apple) has gone to obscene levels to make sure that things fit together well and don’t require a lot of knowledge to use.
Linux is perfect for power users who are willing to put in the time and effort to configure a computing experience tailored to their own needs. For example, Eric talked about the idea of upgrading software. Debian, the linux distribution I’m using for this project, makes it very simple to upgrade software. Two commands from a prompt, or a few mouse clicks, will upgrade every software package on your entire machine. But the conundrum for normal users is that they don’t upgrade software! If their software is broken and tells them they need an upgrade, they click on the link and let it do the work. They wouldn’t even do security updates if Microsoft XP didn’t have “automatic updates” enabled.
Linux could work just fine for an office environment, where an IT professional could configure individual user’s PC’s for what they needed to be doing. It works just fine for individual geeks like myself, who are willing and able to get deep into a system to try to understand what’s going on. But it’s not ready for the casual home user.
In fact, after playing with this, I thought about tossing it on the very old laptop I bought for my wife to surf the net. After all, it’s a Pentum II processor with 64 MB RAM, currently running Windows 2000. This thing is slower than molasses in January. I think a bare-bones Linux installation with something like Icewm instead of memory-intensive packages like KDE or Gnome could dramatically speed this PC up. But a quick attempt at convincing the wife to use Firefox taught me that it’s probably not worth it. So I’ll let her have the slow Windows laptop, because I don’t bother using it anyway. She’d rather have a comfortable known entity than speed, and as long as it doesn’t impact my own computer use, that’s fine with me.
February 7, 2006
Carnival of Liberty XXXI
Blogging has been light, as my little Linux DVR project has been taking up all my time… So go check out the 31st installment of the Carnival of Liberty, hosted this week by the Louisiana Libertarian.
For once I’ve actually had the time to read some of these entries, and I’ll point you at two of my favorites:
Dan at Searchlight Crusade takes on the aborto-centric nature of the Alito debate, along with how it’s affected all Supreme Court issues since Roe, in his post, The Supreme Court and Distortion of the Political Process.
Michael Hampton of Homeland Stupidity (who I have to credit with writing the wonderful Bad Behavior spam plugin for Wordpress) gives us a post titled Expect More Screwing: 28% of federal programs “not performingâ€. He points out the fact that our own government realizes that federal programs are inefficient and ineffectual. Something tells me that this information won’t be passed on to our legislators, of course; or if it is passed on, they won’t really change their behavior. After all, it’s they’re spending other people’s money!
February 6, 2006
Economic House of Cards
MSN Money – The housing bubble is deflating — but gently
Sure looked that way Wednesday. Sales of existing homes dropped by almost 6% in December from November’s pace, according to the monthly survey by the National Association of Realtors. That’s the third straight monthly decline in sales of existing homes. The median price of a house fell by almost 2% from the previous month.
As you’d expect — especially since the drop to an annual sales rate of 6.6 million was worse than the 6.9 million annual sales rate that economists had been expecting — the news knocked the stuffing out of housing stocks. The Ryland Group, for example, dropped 6.4% on the day. The news also killed what had been a weak but promising rally in the stock market as a whole.
But although the data do show a continuing slowdown in the housing market, in my opinion the numbers don’t add up to anything like a bust.
So far, what we’re seeing is a gradual deflation of the housing bubble thanks to higher mortgage rates. The danger signs, if they do exist, are local and concentrated in what had been the hottest housing markets. And there’s certainly no evidence, so far, of any national mortgage debt crisis. Nationally, borrowers are actually showing lower default rates. (In some local markets, default rates are rising, but the troubles in the local economy seem to be the culprit.)
Part of the territory hanging out in those crazy libertarian circles I run in includes an epidemic of economic doomsaying. This comes from those who are the first to criticise the loss of the gold standard and our “fiat money”. It’s further fueled by the recent decision by the fed to stop publishing the M3 money numbers. These people see a large credit expansion and the inevitable end in their sight is the collapse of the US currency and the economy. I think my brother is one of those people. Blog-friend Uncle Jack talks about his worry: the coming day that survival will depend on finding land close to a river and having a rifle to defend it.
Maybe it’s just my optimism coming through, but I just don’t see that happening. I’ve watched as people have gotten themselves into adjustable-rate mortgages on properties they can’t afford in the hot housing markets likely to depreciate over the next year. Those people are screwed. There will be some foreclosures and there will be some pain.
But how widespread will that be? Many borrowers are stretched thin on fixed-rate mortgages for expensive properties they’ve recently bought, and they might find themselves in a poor position over the next few years. If prices decline, even a little, it could make their debt higher than the value of their property. I worry about that personally, as we bought our house 1 year ago, financing 100% of the value. But I’m constantly reminded of what my father used to say about computers: it will never do less than what you bought it to do. If you’re in a fixed-rate mortgage on a property, and you can afford the payments, it will never be more expensive than it is today. With a possible rising income and/or a little bit of inflation, it will end up being less expensive.
I look at what’s happened, and in a lot of ways, it looks like a house of cards. A house of cards will stand just fine, as long as there isn’t a wind or earthquake that comes by. Essentially, a highly leveraged population won’t crumble without a second factor added to the mix. What we would need to see would be an extended recession or a major natural disaster. Yet, we survived a very major natural disaster last year, and without any major crunch? I think the foundation of this credit expansion– the underlying economy– is strong. That is what fueled this boom, and that is why we’ve got at least a well-reinforced house of cards.
The doomsayers underestimate the resiliency of billions of people, across the entire world, working to sustain this economy. In the last five years, the US economy alone has seen terrorist attacks, major corporate scandals, high energy costs, natural disasters, and pressure from other low-cost countries like China and India competing in industries previously the dominion of industrialized nations. Yet we’ve pushed through it all, and our economy is humming along growing larger every day. It will take a lot more than a credit crunch or the actions of our federal reserve to knock down this house of cards.
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The problem with this issue is that I have never, NEVER seen a person swayed by arguments about personal liberties. It’s almost like a secular version of the abortion argument – people have a side to it, and that is that. It drives me absolutely insane to discuss this with someone who is for smoking bans, because they will agree with point after point that I make… and in the end they will say “yeah, I dunno… I get what you’re saying, but I still think there ought to be a law”.
I am quite convinced that in 30 years, smoking will be >95% outlawed in this country. There will be very few choices about it.
Comment by Wulf — February 19, 2006 @ 9:02 am
Carnival of Liberty 34
We get this week’s Carnival of Liberty off to an excellent start,
I hope you will enjoy the efforts that I have had the honor to present
Trackback by Committees of Correspondence — February 28, 2006 @ 11:24 am
Subject to the full disclosure rule, I can agree as far as private property is concerned. Full disclosure being that all publicity materials, help wanted ads, etcetera, bear an obvious notice that smoking is allowed. This means that those entering have made an informed choice to be there, not that they were simply unaware when they made the appointment, and now they are stuck. Furthermore, for those whose employment duties carry them into the site who might choose otherwise (delivery and repair personnel, who have not made a choice to work there, but who are simply told to go there, lest they forfeit employment), there needs to be provision made so that they are not forced to deal with it when they have made no clear choice to do so.
For public property and rights of way, you must consider the damage done to those who travel in good faith, and have not made a conscious choice to be exposed. Many people (myself included) have allergic reactions. Others are made nauseous enough to vomit. Others simply don’t like it. Or would you care to explain what system or aggregation of moral rectitude gives a smoker the right to make those choices for everyone around them? The smoker’s rights end at the nose of anyone who has a legitimate objection, and that’s basically everyone who has not made an informed adult choice to expose themselves.
Unfortunately, the smoke doesn’t stop there. Even if it secondhand smoke had not been shown to be damaging in many ways, even if there were zero health related side-effects, the simple fact that someone finds it unpleasant should give them the ability to avoid it – and not by staying home. In my experience, however, smokers are about as sensitive to this fact as your average black hole. If smokers want to blame someone for the proliferation of smoking bans, the place to start looking is in the mirror. It isn’t every smoker who causes a problem – some are pretty conscientious. But the proportion of those who arrogate unto themselves the privelege of polluting everyone’s breathing supply is more than high enough to justify the non-smoker’s reaction.
Comment by DM — March 1, 2006 @ 12:07 am