We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
Or perhaps a ‘stupidity’ of congressmen? A ‘fantasy’ of lawmakers? An ‘arrogance’ of representatives? They all seem to fit.
The House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved legislation on Tuesday allowing the Justice Department to sue OPEC members for limiting oil supplies and working together to set crude prices, but the White House threatened to veto the measure. The bill would subject OPEC oil producers, including Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela, to the same antitrust laws that U.S. companies must follow.
The measure passed in a 324-84 vote, a big enough margin to override a presidential veto.
The US House of Representatives have just in effect declared that all foreign governments and businesses must be subject to the wishes of US politicians and their regulations and sell oil at prices that US legislators like. Or else. The sheer absurdity of this is breathtaking. Exactly what sanction were they planning against OPEC? Perhaps not buying their fungible oil? Yeah, that will do the trick.
Glenn Reynolds links to this article on not one, but two different pipe bombings in San Diego.
I suspect the answer to the question “Why Haven’t We Heard About This” is to be found in the lack of blood and bodies.
No bleed, no lead.
From time to time I have covered the efforts of libertarian heroes Carla Howell and Michael Cloud to bring about an end to the Massachusetts income tax. They succeeded in the collection and complex certification of a huge number of signatures; they defeated an underhanded counter-attack by the teachers union; they even overcame a law-breaking legislature:
Fourth, although the Massachusetts Constitution requires the state legislature to take testimony on and vote on our END the Income Tax Ballot Initiative, the legislature refused to obey the Constitution. The legislature refused to invite us to give testimony. They refused to vote on our initiative.
Fortunately, the legislature cannot exercise a “pocket veto,” cannot block a ballot initiative by refusing to comply with the state Constitution. A Massachusetts Supreme Court decision allows our Initiative to move forward – even when the legislature violates the state Constitution.
Now they have one more hurdle before they get on the ballot. Another twenty thousand signature collected, distributed to each town for certification and then delivered to the appropriate State official by June 9.
Should be a dawdle for those two, but if you want to help you can do so here.
By the way, I will be working the JPMorgan Tech08 show in Boston later this month.
Andrew Sullivan, who seems to have bought into the Obama campaign wholesale despite Obama’s Big Government views – hardly what Sullivan claims to support – makes this pretty sweeping assertion against those who are unimpressed by Mr Obama and his interesting choice of friends and associates.
It’s extremely depressing that the first major national black politician who takes on the victimology of Sharpton and Jackson is greeted by the right with the kind of cynicism you see at Malkin or the Corner or Reynolds. It reveals, I think, the deeper truth: the Republican right only wants a black Republican to do this.
Well, I guess in the case of Malkin or National Review’s roster of writers at its Corner blog, they are, you know, Republican supporters. They are more interested in the views of the candidate across a whole range of issues – Iraq, spending, the size of the government, security policy, immigration, trade – than whether he or she is going to somehow change the “victimology” that Andrew Sullivan writes about. It is a bit like Sullivan moaning that Roman Catholics are only in favour of black priests who are Catholics rather than Protestants. Well, duh. As for Glenn Reynolds, he once supported the presidential run of Al Gore, if my memory serves, so he is hardly a blind follower of the GOP.
Sullivan’s critique of other bloggers would carry more weight if he could accept that US voters face essentially three big government candidates, albeit with subtle differences. I am surprised that Sullivan has not made more of why this is, and what to do about it.
Swiss banks have not had a good time of it lately, which does rather dent their image of being sober-suited outfits able to protect your millions. UBS, the Zurich-based banking and wealth management group, has booked a total of $37 billion in losses connected to the credit crunch. Wow. Even other banking groups in the Alpine state, like Clariden Leu, Julius Baer and Credit Suisse, have suffered – though not remotely as badly as UBS, which possibly may break up or get taken over.
So I was a bit bemused to read that Credit Suisse has hired former US Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta as an adviser. Has no-one told Credit Suisse that this fellow used to be known unflatteringly as “Underperformin’ Norman” when he was in charge of sorting out airport security and other areas?
I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that have failed in their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is ‘needed’ before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents’ ‘interests’, I shall reply that I was informed their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can.
– Barry Goldwater, US politician. As cited by David Mayer, over at his excellent blog.
I live about twenty miles from the polygamist ranch near Eldorado, Texas, and my office is about three blocks from the courthouse where the child welfare case(s) are being handled. A few observations, from up close:
The Schleicher County sheriff seems to have been in firm control of the law enforcement activities at the ranch, and there really is no federal presence or role at all. This probably has a lot to do with the lack of any kind of violence or armed stand-off, in contrast to the Branch Davidian, um, incident, where the feds disregarded the local sheriff’s advice and went in heavy.
I am perfectly willing to believe that there were all sorts of sexual abuse of teenage girls – illegal marriages, statutory (and perhaps even forcible) rape, etc. If the current allegations pan out, I think that the men involved in what amounts to a sex slavery ring should be jailed, and I am even willing to grant that the state should have the authority to take custody of children who have been subjected to this kind of abuse. For the moment, let us leave avoid the well-ploughed ground about the appropriate age of consent for sex.
That said, this case increasingly looks to me a like a serious overreach by the state, and one that practically begs us to conclude that the state was motivated to take down this community, even when doing so required it to go beyond what was necessary to ensure the welfare of the children.
(Warning: Actual statutory language and legal analysis follows below the fold) → Continue reading: More questions than answers
It is occasionally an accolade when a person’s name becomes a figure of speech, such as ‘Churchillian’ for example. Far more commonly however it is a sign of cultural stigmatisation: a Hitler, a Napoleon, Fisking, Dowdification, Pilgerisation… these are not saying anything nice about the source of the respective terms.
And to which must be added, to be ‘a Spitzer’.
There is a magnificent article on TCS Daily called The Universal Spitzer that I strongly commend to everyone:
It is a shame that we only laugh at a Spitzer when his secret sex life is revealed to us. Instead of mocking Spitzers for their private foibles, we should be contemptuous of their public pronouncements. Whether it is “cleaning up Wall Street” or “giving everyone health care,” the Spitzers are making extravagant promises that only result in expanded government power.
Great stuff. Read the whole thing. The article also links to an excellent article by Virginia Postrel about the deeply unpleasant John McCain which I missed first time around.
Apparently they are exclusive alternatives. According to Wired:
Maine is now the lone state not to have been given an extension to long-delayed Real ID regulations, after three fellow protesting states – Montana, New Hampshire and South Carolina – got their extensions in the last two weeks despite not pledging allegiance to Real ID.
What was it Maine in particular did to offend? There is no clue. One might suspect being the easiest to blockade has something to do with it. Bullies like to pick on the weakest victim when making an example.
Assuming no actual bombs get on the plane, then it scarcely matters who the passengers are – particularly since the rules did change in one important respect on September 11th 2001 and few are likely to sit quietly and do what a hijacker says, as they were advised to before that date. If someone could explain to me why any identification at all is needed to board a plane – other than that the government just wants to know where you are going – then I’d be most grateful for the explanation.
[* Yes I know that is New Hampshire, but presumably it is in the line for the DHS’s third degree.]
Laird Minor, one of our commentariat who has spent a lifetime in this sector of the financial industry felt the first article on the subprime financial crisis gave an incomplete picture. He proceeded to fill in the rest of the story in such fine form that I am re-posting his comment here on the front page so that it will, in conjunction with the first article, give our readers a much better idea of what is going on and what to expect.
Having been a participant in one way or another in the subprime mortgage industry for over 20 years, this is a topic in which I possess a fairly substantial degree of expertise. The first article is reasonably accurate as far as it goes, but there is a lot more to the story. I could probably write a book on this, but I will try to keep this post as brief as I can.
The CRA only applies to banks, and while banks are the originators of a large number of mortgage loans, non-bank lenders have come to comprise a substantial portion of the mortgage industry. This is especially true in the subprime sector. Thus while the CRA was a typically bad Washington idea, propounded by “poverty lobby” zealots with no conception of how the market works, it isn’t really the principal source of the problem. That honor goes to Wall Street.
Subprime loans are not “agency-eligible”, which means that they can not be sold to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, the two huge quasi-governmental agencies that dominate the mortgage world. For this reason subprime lending remained a fairly small segment of the market, much like “payday lenders” are in a different market, until Wall Street figured out how to securitize the loans. Securitization is an extremely valuable financial tool, as it allows loans, which in essence are nothing more than streams of cash flows, to be combined into giant pools and carved up into separate “tranches” having different characteristics as to timing, default risk, etc. By separating these cash flow streams the tranches can be sold to different investors with different investment criteria (insurance companies, for example, have clear actuarially-determined timing needs for cash) which results in better pricing. Overall, securitization created a more efficient market for mortgages, which benefited everybody. Unfortunately, it got out of hand, primarily because of the rating agencies and, to a lesser extent, the monoline bond insurers.
Mortgage-backed securities are rated by Moody’s, Standard & Poors, and Fitch, to determine their investment grade. This affects both price and the appropriate universe of investors. As more and more subprime mortgages and especially unusual ones like “pay-option ARM” loans began to be placed into securitization pools, the rating agencies failed miserably in analyzing them and forecasting their performance characteristics. Monoline insurers, who provide bond insurance for the highest-grade bonds, similarly failed to adequately model these loans’ performance, and thus imposed inadequate credit enhancements (loss reserves, subordination levels, etc.) on the deals. Lenders found that they could sell all the loans they booked, with no meaningful penalty for weak credit quality, so of course they expanded their guidelines. They were merely reacting rationally to signals the market was sending, and do not deserve all the blame for the ultimate melt-down.
So the mortgage pools got riskier and riskier, but no one really appreciated that fact until delinquency levels began to surge last summer: there is a fairly long lag time between mortgage origination and delinquency. Once investors realized how bad the pools had gotten they stopped buying the bonds. The market for mortgage-backed securities ground to a halt almost overnight; pricing for existing securities went into free-fall, and new deals simply couldn’t be completed. And since banks and other financial institutions which own most of those securities are required to write them down to current market values, their paper (unrealized) losses ballooned. This is the reason for such events as the Bear Stearns failure; it had pledged those securities for its borrowings, and when the bond values plummeted and the loans were called they could not come up with the cash.
It is a typical Wall Street “bi-polar” overreaction, but the pain is very real. Property values, which had been driven up by speculative excesses and cheap money (as noted in the first article), are falling rapidly, especially in the areas where they had risen the most (Florida, southern California, Arizona, etc.), and until they bottom out the liquidity crunch will continue. Eventually that will happen, though, and when it does things will return more or less to normal. Hopefully the participants in this market will have learned something from the experience, but I am not sanguine about long-term wisdom; Wall Street has a short memory, and the next generation of traders will probably repeat at least some of these mistakes.
So there is blame to go around: foolish laws and regulations; inadequate understanding of the effects of weakened credit standards; a few, but very few, truly predatory lenders taking advantage of unsophisticated borrowers; and greedy borrowers who were speculating in real estate values or who simply wanted to extract all of the equity in their homes for current consumption. In my opinion this last group is getting far too little of the blame. It was a market failure of monumental proportions, but as long as the politicians will stay out of the way the market will correct itself; it always does. Unfortunately, it now appears that politicians, who always want to be seen as “doing something”, whether it makes sense or not, will muck around in matters which they don’t understand and make things worse.
The Law of Unintended Consequences will come back to bite us. It always does.
From NRO ‘The Campaign Spot’:
The tour will begin at McCain field, named for the family in Mississippi. McCain will note in a speech there that a distant ancestor served on George Washington’s staff, and “it seems that my ancestors served in every conflict this country has fought”. One of the themes in that speech will be how government should support parents, and how it should help, not complicate, how parents pass on their values to their children.
Holy. Crap. And this is the Republican candidate. Read that again: “government should support parents, and how it should help, not complicate, how parents pass on their values to their children”. Just de-construct that for a moment. Is that not a phrase that should send cold shivers down the spines of anyone who thinks civil society has been fucked over by the state quite enough for the last fifty or so years, thank you very much?
Clearly the government does not want any old values passed on to the kiddies, so John McCain must see a role for state approved politically vetted family values. And what if someone want to pass on the values of respecting the property of others and so not tolerating proxy theft via third parties (like, say, the state), is Johnny going help out there somehow? How about atheism? Contrary to the popular perceptions, I know a great many God-Free Americans (almost all of whom are self-described hyphenated Republicans). Will the state give them a hand passing that one on to Junior too? How about utter contempt for the political elite and their army of functionaries? John McCain’s kind offer to ‘help‘ is another manifestation of the baseless arrogance of so many members of the political class who think that civil society revolves around the state and is something for them to tinker with.
So John, let me tell you how to “help, not complicate, how parents pass on their values to their children”… mind your own goddamn business. There is nothing complicated about that.
I received and read a copy of this article from DC Downsizers early this month but have only today been given a go ahead for republication. I think you will find it an interesting and refreshing account of just who is responsible for the whole subprime mortgage problem.
You can watch hours and hours of news, or read columns of print in most newspapers, and come away no wiser about the causes and prospects for the current financial turmoil.
Most journalists and TV talking heads do not really understand the subject, and those that do speak and write using so much jargon that the average person must feel he or she is trying to follow a conversation in ancient Hebrew.
We are going to try to cut through the jargon, and explain the situation as best we can, in plain English. If you find our explanation of value, please forward it to others.
The current housing crisis, and all that flows from it, comes from two main sources, both deriving from Washington. → Continue reading: What you are not being told about the current financial crisis
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
