Category Archives: Private Property

UPDATE IV: Forclosure Fracas (Still About Deadbeats)

Business, Debt, Federal Reserve Bank, Law, libertarianism, Private Property, Reason

Vox Day, friend and fellow (libertarian) rebel on WND.COM, has objected to my comments about his bank foreclosure comments in the BAB post titled “Financial Paperwork Crisis (No Conspiracy Thinking, Please).” Vox and I have been exchanging emails on the topic. Vox traces the arguments back-and-forth in his post “A dialogue with Ilana (UPDATED).”

Consider: You’re a homeowners. You have a mortgage with the bank. The title deed is yours; you have a legal right or title to the property. However, this obtains just as long as you honor your mortgage payments. The bank has a lien on the property until you pay-up the mortgage. If you pay your monthly mortgage installments, and the bank has cashed these payments, your bank account will reflect that. If you’ve met these conditions, and the bank, nevertheless, proceeds to foreclose on you—this is an error, and a legal and statistical anomaly; an outlier case.

It is my understanding that Vox refutes the above; says the latter scenario may be the norm, or could easily become the norm due to endemic fraud.

Distilled, I contend that it is almost always true that a necessary condition for a foreclosure is for the homeowner to have failed to make his mortgage payments. It is my understanding that Vox disputes this.

I told Vox that the one article he referred me to “began with a one-case study as its proof. This is statistically worse than insignificant. The article graduated to assertion. Then added another one-case study.” Vox may well be right, “but the data in the column he provided do not prove his case.

I have since Googled some of the terms Vox deploys in his post. One search led me to the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein. When Ezra does get something right it is only by accident. In any event, the Klein article does not support the Day case (as I understood it), namely that the foreclosed upon are being treated unjustly, even routinely robbed of their property.

Understand: I have no dog in the fracas other than the truth; am quite ready to find for Vox. So far, the hard evidence is missing.

Our debate might be delayed for a while, but it will continue. Stay tuned.

UPDATED I (Oct. 18): Difster’s comment hereunder is mostly waffle unless he is able to address what I wrote in the post: has the homeowner being foreclosed upon been paying his debt or not. He can’t. I really can’t abide argument that doesn’t cleave to reality and evidence. Bring me evidence of all the cases of paid-up homeowners who’ve been foreclosed upon. Present that here, please.

UPDATE II: Judging from this tale of woe, the lawyers for the defaulting borrower are themselves using what they consider irregularities of procedure to try and get their delinquent client’s debt forgiven. I am not saying that “MERS, the electronic mortgage tracking system,” and the banks that use it, are following the letter of the law, but what people seem to be skirting here, much to my horror, is that these borrowers owe money they borrowed. You don’t forgive someone’s debt because the debt-holder’s bureaucracy is bad, or even dubious. And you don’t accuse bankers as a group of robbing home owners of title to their homes, because of problems of paper trail. (As I pointed out here, to argue against the bankers, in this case, on the ground that they are, moreover, embroiled in the fractional reserve system is to make an error of logic, maybe even a categorical error. Along the lines of releasing murderers because justice system is corrupt, etc.)

Note too that nowhere do the delinquent borrowers deny that they have not paid their debts, only that they are struggling “to figure out who owns their loans, who can negotiate loan modifications with them, or even how to get a call returned.”

Also: Borrowers are deploying the very argument the bankers are using: it’s the bureaucracy.

What do you know, it seems that, as outlined in this BAB post, “the latest foreclosure crisis is indeed bureaucratic in nature.”

UPDATE III: The thing to take away from Vox’s WND column today is this line: “the law is very clear on the matter: ‘If the chain of title is broken, then the borrower’s loan is no longer secured by the property.'”

This is the positive law. The fact of the borrower’s debt is unchanged. A took from B in order to buy C. That’s another “chain” to keep in mind.

UPDATE IV (Oct. 19): STILL ABOUT DEADBEATS. From all the reports so far, FBN’s Gerri Willis’ being the latest, it is as I said. The defaulters owe boatloads of money. The bankers bungled the paper work in a manner that verges on the criminal. The reality, in as much as property rights go, comports with my distillation on this post and the one linked to it, “Financial Paperwork Crisis (No Conspiracy Thinking, Please).”

Life In The Oink Sector Revisited

Free Markets, Government, Private Property, South-Africa, The State

“Life In The Oink Sector” detailed the cost to the private economy of the ever-growing public sector, likening the public-private sector relationship to that of “parasite vs. host. The first is sucking the lifeblood of the second. The larger the parasite gets, the weaker the host will grow.”

Now John Stossel takes on the public sector “bankrupting America”:

“NY Transit Union boss, John Samuelsen argues, we are the richest country in the world and can afford it. Really?

Here are some of the facts;

Public pensions have unfunded liability of $1 trillion [1] to $3.5 trillion [2]

Federal workers take home twice pay and benefits [3] as private workers. Local and state workers also make more [4].

Total Pay Benefits

Private $59,909 $50,028 $9,881

Local/state $67,812 $52,051 $15,761

Federal $119,982 $79,197 $40,785

— Average TWU union worker makes $60K without overtime or benefits.

— 25% took 15 or more sick days. Average was 8 sick days.

— Fox average 3 sick days (same for men and women)

— No FOX employee took 15 days

Relative Danger of Jobs (Deaths per 100,000 workers)

— Fishing 128.9

–Logging 115.7

–Iron workers 46.4

–Farmers 39.5

–Firemen 3.8

–Transit workers 1.4

(Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, except Transit worker death, that is from interview with TWU Local100 President)

Some people argue that there’s no alternative to the government monopoly on municipal work, but Sandy Springs, Georgia, privatized most of it’s jobs in 2005. Now the city pays about ½ of what it used to pay. It enjoys a $14 million surplus, in addition to funding a $20 million reserve.”

[SNIP]

Incidentally, the most dangerous job—even more hazardous than fishing—is farming in South Africa. The mortality rate (due to murder) among Boers stands at 300 per 100,000.

It’s in my upcoming book (now lingering with the publisher).

UPDATED: On Second Thought: Obama Is Stupid (More Communal “Ownership”)

Barack Obama, Political Economy, Private Property, Taxation

Barack Obama does not understand the difference between a TAX CUT and a TAX CREDIT. He thinks cutting taxes is tantamount to cutting welfare checks. In an “hour-long town hall meeting sponsored by CNBC,” aimed at bamboozling “Boobus Americanus” with his “eloquence,” Obama declared:

“What the Republicans are proposing is that we . . . provide tax relief to primarily millionaires and billionaires. It would cost us $700 billion to do it. On average, millionaires would get a check of $100,000.”

“Tax credits” are not tax cuts, they are “subsidies disguised as tax cuts. In other words, they are spending in the form of direct transfers from the treasury to individuals, except that they are administered by the tax authorities rather than the agencies usually responsible for welfare.”

A better definition of tax credits is social tinkering or engineering, as they target certain politically desirable constituents to the detriment of others. “Taxpayers can receive a raft of tax credits if they engage in various government-specified activities,” confirms Peter Ferrara, director of entitlement and budget policy for the Institute for Policy Innovation.

A tax cut, of course, is a reduction in tax rates. It means letting a poor sod (or serf) keep more of his rightful earnings.

The man with the reverse-Midas touch—who cannot get his head around the idea of property rights—added that “his administration is looking at the possibility of a payroll tax holiday, in addition to research-and-development tax breaks for corporations.”

Taxes are private property plundered. The government has several ways to pay for its obligations, one of which is to seize private property in the form of taxes. The particular portion of the “stim” and bailouts that was not borrowed or counterfeited by the Fed once belonged to individual Americans. Thus, a tax cut for high-income earners, who also pay most of the taxes, is tantamount to a return of stolen goods.

The distinction between what is mine and what is thine evades the president.

The reason the line about soaking the rich “drew applause from the audience of about 200 or so gathered at the Newseum in Washington” is to be found in an experiment conducted at the Universities of Warwick and Oxford, which was more of a confirmation than an investigation of human nature.

“Ingeniously operationalized by Professor Andrew Oswald and Dr. Daniel Zizzo, the experiment demonstrated the lengths to which people will go to destroy the wealth of others, even if, in the process, they knowingly wipe out their own funds.”

“The economists approximated reality by distributing cash unequally among the subjects, who were then told they could anonymously ‘burn away other people’s money,’ with one caveat: in the process, they would be destroying some of their own. Naively, the researchers expected little ‘burning’ to occur, and certainly for it to stop once the destruction of the opponent’s money became too painful to the player’s pocket. They were flummoxed when 62 percent of the subjects continued to ‘burn’ the wealth of others even at crippling costs to themselves.”

Laboratory-to-life extrapolations can be problematic, but this experiment transports effortlessly.

UPDATE (Sept. 21): “What Should We Do With the Estate Tax?” is the title of a legit article in the War Street Journal. Evidently, an inheritance belongs to the royal “We.” “A huge amount of money hangs in the balance,” says the author of the piece. Whose bloody money is it anyway?

On the bright side: a slight deviation from rank utilitarianism is evident in questioning whether “such a tax is fair to heirs, not to mention the people who worked and saved over the decades to build up those assets.”

UPDATED: On Second Thought: Obama Is Stupid (More Communal "Ownership")

Barack Obama, Political Economy, Private Property, Taxation

Barack Obama does not understand the difference between a TAX CUT and a TAX CREDIT. He thinks cutting taxes is tantamount to cutting welfare checks. In an “hour-long town hall meeting sponsored by CNBC,” aimed at bamboozling “Boobus Americanus” with his “eloquence,” Obama declared:

“What the Republicans are proposing is that we . . . provide tax relief to primarily millionaires and billionaires. It would cost us $700 billion to do it. On average, millionaires would get a check of $100,000.”

“Tax credits” are not tax cuts, they are “subsidies disguised as tax cuts. In other words, they are spending in the form of direct transfers from the treasury to individuals, except that they are administered by the tax authorities rather than the agencies usually responsible for welfare.”

A better definition of tax credits is social tinkering or engineering, as they target certain politically desirable constituents to the detriment of others. “Taxpayers can receive a raft of tax credits if they engage in various government-specified activities,” confirms Peter Ferrara, director of entitlement and budget policy for the Institute for Policy Innovation.

A tax cut, of course, is a reduction in tax rates. It means letting a poor sod (or serf) keep more of his rightful earnings.

The man with the reverse-Midas touch—who cannot get his head around the idea of property rights—added that “his administration is looking at the possibility of a payroll tax holiday, in addition to research-and-development tax breaks for corporations.”

Taxes are private property plundered. The government has several ways to pay for its obligations, one of which is to seize private property in the form of taxes. The particular portion of the “stim” and bailouts that was not borrowed or counterfeited by the Fed once belonged to individual Americans. Thus, a tax cut for high-income earners, who also pay most of the taxes, is tantamount to a return of stolen goods.

The distinction between what is mine and what is thine evades the president.

The reason the line about soaking the rich “drew applause from the audience of about 200 or so gathered at the Newseum in Washington” is to be found in an experiment conducted at the Universities of Warwick and Oxford, which was more of a confirmation than an investigation of human nature.

“Ingeniously operationalized by Professor Andrew Oswald and Dr. Daniel Zizzo, the experiment demonstrated the lengths to which people will go to destroy the wealth of others, even if, in the process, they knowingly wipe out their own funds.”

“The economists approximated reality by distributing cash unequally among the subjects, who were then told they could anonymously ‘burn away other people’s money,’ with one caveat: in the process, they would be destroying some of their own. Naively, the researchers expected little ‘burning’ to occur, and certainly for it to stop once the destruction of the opponent’s money became too painful to the player’s pocket. They were flummoxed when 62 percent of the subjects continued to ‘burn’ the wealth of others even at crippling costs to themselves.”

Laboratory-to-life extrapolations can be problematic, but this experiment transports effortlessly.

UPDATE (Sept. 21): “What Should We Do With the Estate Tax?” is the title of a legit article in the War Street Journal. Evidently, an inheritance belongs to the royal “We.” “A huge amount of money hangs in the balance,” says the author of the piece. Whose bloody money is it anyway?

On the bright side: a slight deviation from rank utilitarianism is evident in questioning whether “such a tax is fair to heirs, not to mention the people who worked and saved over the decades to build up those assets.”