Category Archives: Private Property

UPDATED (6/9): What Larry Kudlow & Stephen Moore Are Hiding About Bush & Housing Bubble

Bush, Hillary Clinton, Private Property, Regulation, Republicans

George W. Bush did his share to bring about the housing bubble, and Stephen Moore, formerly of the Wall Street Journal, knows it. Moore wrote a book he’d like us to forget: “Bullish on Bush: How the Ownership Society Is Making America Richer” (2004). “Bullish” got one and a half stars on Amazon and it had almost no takers. Moore and Larry Kudlow have no business obfuscating about Number 43’s enthusiasm for giving credit to those who were not creditworthy.

Lawrence B. Lindsey, Mr. Bush’s first chief economics adviser, said there was little impetus to raise alarms about the proliferation of easy credit that was helping Mr. Bush meet housing goals. “No one wanted to stop that bubble,” Mr. Lindsey said. “It would have conflicted with the president’s own policies.”

The two’s article, “Are the Clintons the Real Housing-Crash Villains?”, offers only a veiled allusion to the shared Clinton-Bush blame for the housing bubble:

There was plenty of blame to go around among both political parties and the horde of housing lobbyists who helped set up this real estate house of cards. It’s a sordid story. And the Fannie/Freddie chapter is still not solved. It now includes profit-sweeping from shareholders to the government, thereby ending any chance to sell the mortgage agencies back to the private sector.

But not a word about Bush II. And no mea culpa from Moore for his zeal for Bush’s phony “ownership society.”

UPDATE (6/9/016):

Comments Off on UPDATED (6/9): What Larry Kudlow & Stephen Moore Are Hiding About Bush & Housing Bubble

Bernie Sanders Economics: The Reason Venezuela Is Starving

Communism, Economy, Individual Rights, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Intellectualism, Private Property, Socialism

If you plant a Bernie Sanders sign in your yard—a man who has promises variations on price controls and nationalization of industries—you should suffer the worst of fates. The problem: Everybody will be affected by your emotions-driven economic and ethical ignorance—ignorance of the natural laws of economics and oblivion to the rights of free individuals to freely exchange titles to private property. In Bernie style, shortages will be blamed on “evil producers.” Further incursions will follow as “evil producers” are roped into bondage by the state. As such interventions beget more of the same, we will end up with the “Venezuela Playbook: The Communist Manifesto.”

… This choice between “fair” prices and arrest is now the norm for business owners in Venezuela. The most outrageous instance of this took place in early November, when government security forces occupied local electronics stores and began handing out TVs and other wares at “fair” (read: rock-bottom) prices. Hebert Garcia, head of the High Commission for the People’s Defense of the Economy, put it bluntly: “We have to guarantee that everybody has a plasma television and the latest-generation fridge.”
Not surprisingly, the masses lined up around the block for their piece of the government’s action. Too bad the government has failed to provide enough electricity to power the plunder. In most countries, this would be called government theft. But, under Maduro’s reign of Marxism, this redistribution has become business as usual. …

Discussion on Facebook.

Michael Walls: The fact that communism appeals so heavily to “intellectuals” is disturbing. Socialism is just “communism lite”, and the communism that socialism derived from is so absurd in it’s details it’s hard not to laugh out loud reading it. Maybe we need to re-examine the term “intellectual”.

Ilana Mercer No, Michael Walls, the fact that some communists are deemed or called “heavily intellectual” is what’s disturbing—disturbing for what it says on how we judge intellect. Your conclusion is 100%.

Educate yourself by reading.

State-Controlled Airport Security In The West Hires For Terrorism

Affirmative Action, Homeland Security, Islam, Jihad, Private Property, Terrorism, The State

Donald Trump has a point when he emphasizes that the doomed EgyptAir flight MS804 had taken off (on Thursday May 19) from the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. All roads these days lead to the Dar al-Islam of France or Belgium and to government controlled airports where hiring is in accordance with a preferential spoils system based on race and gender. (And if you’re a black Muslim woman, wearing a nose bag, you’re perfect for the job.)

The Center for Security Policy seems focused on Paris, too:

While Egyptair Flight MS804 made six stops prior to the disaster, authorities in France are questioning workers at its last stop, Charles De Gaulle Airport, a reflection of growing concerns about the safety of air travel thanks to suspected penetration of sensitive airport sites by employees sympathetic to jihad.

Last December, following the Paris attacks Augustin de Romanet, head of the Paris Aeroport Authority, noted that 4,000 employees had their lockers searched, and 70 of them lost their red cards and were terminated over terrorism concerns. Red cards granted airport employees access to restricted parts of the airport including access to the plane. Last October, six IS sympathizers working as baggage handlers at Sharm el-Sheikh Airport in Cairo, allegedly developed the explosives used to destroy Russian Metrojet 9268.

On March 22, 2016, IS members attacked the Brussels-Zaventem Airport in Brussels killing 32 people. Two of the suicide bombers Ibrahim el-Bakraoui and Najim Lachraoui had worked at the airport as a custodians. The Daily Mail reported that Brussels-Zaventem airport had 50 jihadist sympathizers among their employees.

U.S. airports have also seen breaches. In 2015, multiple reports displayed security concerns at U.S. airports including hundreds of employee security badges from Hartfield and Dallas-Fort Worth airports went missing. In addition, reports found 73 TSA workers in U.S. airports were found to have already been placed on the terror watch list, yet did not have their access to sensitive areas terminated.

As for our Transportation Security Administration and Homeland Security, not for nothing have the news nitworks stopped interviewing Israeli experts. This from “TSA: Home Grown Terrorism (& Cretinism)”:

In the words of a horrified Israeli aviation security expert, speaking to a Fox News crew: “You cannot allow the security personnel to see, and show the entire world, images of naked bodies of women and men!” Amid ongoing American insanity, this laconic Israeli, Isaac Yeffet, has been making the rounds on CNN, PBS, Fox News—has been doing so for a decade, at least. Yeffet is a former member of the Israeli Secret Service, and was once in charge of security for El Al. Almost a year has past since Fox News probed him for his opinion about the “full body scanners.” Nearly ten years have gone by since the man testified before an equally idiotic Congress.

No other western country is a bigger target for terrorists than Israel. Yet no other nation runs a better (largely privatized), less invasive, smarter, security system, whose able agents simply talk to travelers. These profilers understand that 99.9 percent of fliers are “bona fide” (Yeffet’s favored bon mot). “Shoes aren’t removed, passengers aren’t body scanned, and there are no pat downs,” confirms the New York Times. A “hand search” is seldom conducted, and only with probable cause.

Fox News wanted tough answers; Yeffet gave them smart ones. In countless news interviews over the years, Yeffet has implied that there is no substitute for intelligence—intelligence as in smarts; as in that dreaded G Factor. (No, Cosmo Magazine readers, that’s not the same as the G Spot.)

In a few, well-chosen words, Yeffet has suggested that the thousands hired by the TSA are riffraff. “What we should do is to stop using a low level of people.” And, “Unqualified and untrained people, undedicated people are running the security in our country.” “We need to hire people that, at minimum, have graduated from high school; speak English, are U.S. citizens.” (PBS’s NewsHour, 2002.) “Technology can help the qualified, well-trained human-being but cannot replace him. … We must look at the qualifications of the candidate for security jobs. He must be educated. He must speak two languages.” (CNN.)

Does Pidgin English qualify as a second language?

Yeffet’s are valiant but vain efforts to warn America that homegrown retardation is by far its most pressing problem. Alas, in addition to the perverse incentives that power all state bureaucracies, in general, government departments are staffed in accordance with a spoils system based on race and gender, and not on intelligence.

TSA , VA, ObamaCare, SandersCare; Gov.Com: Economically They’re The Same

Economy, Government, Healthcare, Homeland Security, Political Economy, Private Property, The State

To the economically literate: It’s your obligation to know by now—especially if you read this space—that nothing the head of the Transportation Security Administration and Homeland Security can say or do will change the fact of “long waits at the nation’s airports” this summer and any other peak travel time.

Lines—overload, undersupply, malfunction—are a function of a government system, whose incentives were explained in “Why Government ‘Care’ Will Never, Ever Work,” and elsewhere:

Since it “manages” money not its own, government has no real incentive to conserve resources, ensure a job is properly done, or deliver on its promises. Entrusted with the administration of assets you don’t own, have no stake in; on behalf of people you don’t know and who have no real recourse against your mismanagement—how long before your on-the-job performance mirrors that of the government? …

… A monopolist, moreover, doesn’t have to please consumers, because he has them cornered. Therefore, in a politburo, political decisions trounce considerations that would win out in the market place. Consider: HealthCare.gov was coded with the goal of harvesting sensitive information from applicants while concealing rip-off prices from them. Why would the Central Planning Board (aka the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in charge of Obamcare) care that such coding has created a hacker’s dream, when their wet dream is to share data culled through HealthCare.gov with the IRS, the DHS, the TSA, on and on?

Like the communist elite, the Congress elite seldom subjects itself to the same health care or the same laws as the people. Unsurprisingly—and by legislative sleight of hand—lawmakers have used their privileged positions to pass laws exempting themselves and their lackeys from liability. “Governmental immunity” is designed to “stop people from suing the government and government employees and officials in many cases.”

With taxpayers ponying up for any … slip … and responsibility collectivized—fear of being fired or penalized is non-existent among the ruling class. Government failure will never see the closing of a government agency, or the firing of nasty, inefficient, over-paid, affirmatively appointed official.

I hope you are able to generalize from healthcare.gov to TSA.gov, to VA.gov and beyond.

Economically, the incentive structure is the same in the TSA , ObamaCare, SandersCare, Gov.Com.

The nationalization of airports by BUSH II was first explored in “WHOSE PROPERTY IS IT ANYWAY?” (June 5, 2002). Read it. Teach it.