8-13-11 Hodgepodge

Saturday, August 13, 2011

Getting There

Continuing a theme from yesterday, I'll note that Thrutch carries an announcement from The Undercurrent, which reads, in part:

In his lecture at this summer's Objectivist conference, Yaron Brook, President of the Ayn Rand Institute, reflected on the first 50 years of the Objectivist movement. During that session, Dr. Brook stated that if we are to succeed in changing the culture, "we need more than an Institute: we need a movement."

We at The Undercurrent wholeheartedly agree, and we think a key part of the Objectivist movement needs to be a student movement. For the upcoming academic year, we're planning a number of programs designed to spark an Objectivist student movement on college campuses. To make these programs possible, we're asking for your support.
Read the whole thing.

The Landlord-in-Chief

After inflating housing prices on the way to wreaking havoc with the economy, our government has learned from its mistake and vowed never again to interfere with pricing mechanisms in the marketplace.

Just kidding. Our government has, instead, merely devised a new way of supporting housing prices:
The Obama administration may turn thousands of government-owned foreclosures into rental properties to help boost falling home prices.
This will appear to be good news to current homeowners and potential sellers, but it will be bad news for potential homeowners looking for bargains. On the bright side, Obama will fail to succeed in even looking like he is everyone's savior.


Weekend Reading

"Why not dump your entire stock portfolio and go out for ice cream? That's exactly the kind of all-or-none fallacy we buy into in the midst of a panic." -- Jonathan Hoenig, in "First Rule in Panics: Don't Panic" at SmartMoney

"Our government can attempt to 'shoot the messenger' all it wants. But its current policy of spending more money than it has will eventually catch up with us all." -- Paul Hsieh, in "Don't Shoot the Downgrade Messenger" at PajamasMedia

"All the technology and potent raw materials in the world are worthless if oil producers are not free to develop and profit from oil." -- Alex Epstein, in "We're Running out of Freedom, Not Oil" at The Daily Caller

"Yes, we are subject to error, but the good thing about errors is that they're almost always correctable and we can live a better life by learning from them." -- Michael Hurd, in "Top Ten Mistakes We Make" at DrHurd.com

XKCD: How to Create a Good Password


Heh -- and yeah!

-- CAV

2 comments:

Jim said...

Two additional points related to rentals by the housing GSEs:

(1) I expect that these properties will be exempt from local and state taxes, which gives them an advantage over private rentals and potentially adding to the tax burden of other private real estate owners.

(2) I expect that this effort will fail to convert such property from GSE ownership as part of a GSE wind down policy, which was promised by both the President and Congress.

Gus Van Horn said...

Agreed. And imagine all the opportunities to attach cute federal rules as conditions for renting.

Nothing good can come of this.