Almost all the music I listen to is tracked at last.fm. You can see recent songs that I’ve listened to in the sidebar.

The problem is that all music listened to on our home theater computer is also tracked by last.fm. One of last.fm’s features is the ability to listen to a stream of music that reflects the listeners musical taste. So Celtic Black Metal (death metal with a tin whistle) then backyardigans… maybe some underground hip-hop that is immediately followed by a Dora the Explorer song. From Raffi to death metal, my last.fm account is a reflection of my family and how we listen to music.

This opt in broadcasting of our personal lives gives everyone an opportunity to see aspects of people that would normally be hidden. Take every usenet post, blog post, forum post, twitter, song, purchase, picture, or video that’s been taken of my life and you would quickly find more information about me than is contained in a biography of a famous person from even 2 decades ago. None of this information is particularly useful or interesting, but it does make me wonder how my daughters’ lives will look through this profusion of information. They both have upwards of 1000 pictures already. When they are old enough to begin to contribute and shape their own exposure to the outside world, how much more will be captured?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/magazine/29Dyson-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp.

Oh and Larry Niven gets a mention.

It expresses his concerns about the modern environmental movement and the direction it shifts our focus. I agree with him. The article is not about that particularly. It’s about the result of his opinion within the scientific community.

How odd that I plead open mindedness in order to convince people that Global Warming is not the threat it is made out to be. I only say that in the context that there are other things that CAN be solved that would have a far greater effect on humanity than addressing our impact on the environment. Global warming could have a disastrous effect, but there are other things that are killing people now and in much greater numbers than even the worst projections of the side effects of global warming. I have to justify saying this at any time and in some ways it pains me to have to make that justification, but the voices screaming out about this and many other modern issues are so reminiscent of tribal warfare and mob politics that to somehow seem as if I’m in agreement with anyone at all who has made any partisan public discourse into a mud slinging scream-fest, that I can’t do so anymore without feeling pangs of my own conscience.

In such a time my advice would be to disbelieve EVERYTHING, even Freeman dyson. I might agree with him, but you don’t have to. I would however like to have logical debates with people that don’t make them feel uncomfortable, and if that means I have to hate every talking head with every fibre of my being, so be it.

They also invite anyone to dive into the debate via their own blogs.

The essay this month is Corporations Versus the Market; or, Whip Conflation Now.

I’ve have a reply up within the next week or so. To be completely fair I generally agree with the essayist but have a few comments primarily revolving around international trade. I’ll also have notes on the commentary by other essayists.

I’ll be back soon.

I’m posting the entire article here as well. It’s absolutely hilarious, and contains more wordplay than a rap battle.

We Blew It
A look back in remorse on the conservative opportunity that was squandered.
by P.J. O’Rourke
11/17/2008, Volume 014, Issue 09

Let us bend over and kiss our ass goodbye. Our 28-year conservative opportunity to fix the moral and practical boundaries of government is gone–gone with the bear market and the Bear Stearns and the bear that’s headed off to do you-know-what in the woods on our philosophy.

An entire generation has been born, grown up, and had families of its own since Ronald Reagan was elected. And where is the world we promised these children of the Conservative Age? Where is this land of freedom and responsibility, knowledge, opportunity, accomplishment, honor, truth, trust, and one boring hour each week spent in itchy clothes at church, synagogue, or mosque? It lies in ruins at our feet, as well it might, since we ourselves kicked the shining city upon a hill into dust and rubble. The progeny of the Reagan Revolution will live instead in the universe that revolves around Hyde Park.

Mind you, they won’t live in Hyde Park. Those leafy precincts will be reserved for the micromanagers and macro-apparatchiks of liberalism–for Secretary of the Department of Peace Bill Ayers and Secretary of the Department of Fairness Bernardine Dohrn. The formerly independent citizens of our previously self-governed nation will live, as I said, around Hyde Park. They will make what homes they can in the physical, ethical, and intellectual slums of the South Side of Chicago.

The South Side of Chicago is what everyplace in America will be once the Democratic administration and filibuster-resistant Democratic Congress have tackled global warming, sustainability, green alternatives to coal and oil, subprime mortgage foreclosures, consumer protection, business oversight, financial regulation, health care reform, taxes on the “rich,” and urban sprawl. The Democrats will have plenty of time to do all this because conservatism, if it is ever reborn, will not come again in the lifetime of anyone old enough to be rounded up by ACORN and shipped to the polling booths.

None of this is the fault of the left. After the events of the 20th century–national socialism, international socialism, inter-species socialism from Earth First–anyone who is still on the left is obviously insane and not responsible for his or her actions. No, we on the right did it. The financial crisis that is hoisting us on our own petard is only the latest (if the last) of the petard hoistings that have issued from the hindquarters of our movement. We’ve had nearly three decades to educate the electorate about freedom, responsibility, and the evils of collectivism, and we responded by creating a big-city-public-school-system of a learning environment.

Liberalism had been running wild in the nation since the Great Depression. At the end of the Carter administration we had it cornered in one of its dreadful low-income housing projects or smelly public parks or some such place, and we held the Taser gun in our hand, pointed it at the beast’s swollen gut, and didn’t pull the trigger. Liberalism wasn’t zapped and rolled away on a gurney and confined somewhere until it expired from natural causes such as natural law or natural rights.

In our preaching and our practice we neglected to convey the organic and universal nature of freedom. Thus we ensured our loss before we even began our winning streak. Barry Goldwater was an admirable and principled man. He took an admirably principled stand on states’ rights. But he was dead wrong. Separate isn’t equal. Ask a kid whose parents are divorced.

Since then modern conservatism has been plagued by the wrong friends and the wrong foes. The “Southern Strategy” was bequeathed to the Republican party by Richard Nixon–not a bad friend of conservatism but no friend at all. The Southern Strategy wasn’t needed. Southern whites were on–begging the pardon of the Scopes trial jury–an evolutionary course toward becoming Republican. There’s a joke in Arkansas about a candidate hustling votes in the country. The candidate asks a farmer how many children he has.

“I’ve got six sons,” the farmer says.

“Are they all good little Democrats?” the candidate asks.

“Well,” the farmer says, “five of ‘em are. But my oldest boy, he got to readin’  .  .  .  ”

There was no need to piss off the entire black population of America to get Dixie’s electoral votes. And despising cracker trash who have a laundry hamper full of bedsheets with eye-holes cut in them does not make a man a liberal.

Blacks used to poll Republican. They did so right up until Mrs. Roosevelt made some sympathetic noises in 1932. And her husband didn’t even deliver on Eleanor’s promises.

It’s not hard to move a voting bloc. And it should be especially easy to move voters to the right. Sensible adults are conservative in most aspects of their private lives. If this weren’t so, imagine driving on I-95: The majority of drivers are drunk, stoned, making out, or watching TV, while the rest are trying to calculate the size of their carbon footprints on the backs of Whole Foods receipts while negotiating lane changes.

People are even more conservative if they have children. Nobody with kids is a liberal, except maybe one pothead in Marin County. Everybody wants his or her children to respect freedom, exercise responsibility, be honest, get educated, have opportunities, and own a bunch of guns. (The last is optional and includes, but is not limited to, me, my friends in New Hampshire, and Sarah Palin.)

Reagan managed to reach out to blue collar whites. But there his reach stopped, leaving many people on our side, but barely knowing it. There are enough yarmulkes among the neocons to show that Jews are not immune to conservatism. Few practicing Catholics vote Democratic anymore except in Massachusetts where they put something in the communion wafers. When it comes to a full-on, hemp-wearing, kelp-eating, mandala-tatted, fool-coifed liberal with socks in sandals, I have never met a Muslim like that or a Chinese and very few Hispanics. No U.S. immigrants from the Indian subcontinent fill that bill (the odd charlatan yogi excepted), nor do immigrants from Africa, Eastern Europe, or East Asia. And Japanese tourists may go so far as socks in sandals, but their liberal nonsense stops at the ankles.

We have all of this going for us, worldwide. And yet we chose to deliver our sermons only to the faithful or the already converted. Of course the trailer park Protestants yell “Amen.” If you were handling rattlesnakes and keeping dinosaurs for pets, would you vote for the party that gets money from PETA?

In how many ways did we fail conservatism? And who can count that high? Take just one example of our unconserved tendency to poke our noses into other people’s business: abortion. Democracy–be it howsoever conservative–is a manifestation of the will of the people. We may argue with the people as a man may argue with his wife, but in the end we must submit to the fact of being married. Get a pro-life friend drunk to the truth-telling stage and ask him what happens if his 14-year-old gets knocked up. What if it’s rape? Some people truly have the courage of their convictions. I don’t know if I’m one of them. I might kill the baby. I will kill the boy.

The real message of the conservative pro-life position is that we’re in favor of living. We consider people–with a few obvious exceptions–to be assets. Liberals consider people to be nuisances. People are always needing more government resources to feed, house, and clothe them and to pick up the trash around their FEMA trailers and to make sure their self-esteem is high enough to join community organizers lobbying for more government resources.

If the citizenry insists that abortion remain legal–and, in a passive and conflicted way, the citizenry seems to be doing so–then give the issue a rest. Meanwhile we can, with the public’s blessing, refuse to spend taxpayers’ money on killing, circumscribe the timing and method of taking a human life, make sure parental consent is obtained when underage girls are involved, and tar and feather teenage boys and run them out of town on a rail. The law cannot be made identical with morality. Scan the list of the Ten Commandments and see how many could be enforced even by Rudy Giuliani.

Our impeachment of President Clinton was another example of placing the wrong political emphasis on personal matters. We impeached Clinton for lying to the government. To our surprise the electorate gave us cold comfort. Lying to the government: It’s called April 15th. And we accused Clinton of lying about sex, which all men spend their lives doing, starting at 15 bragging about things we haven’t done yet, then on to fibbing about things we are doing, and winding up with prevarications about things we no longer can do.

When the Monica Lewinsky news broke, my wife set me straight about the issue. “Here,” she said, “is the most powerful man in the world. And everyone hates his wife. What’s the matter with Sharon Stone? Instead, he’s hitting on an emotionally disturbed intern barely out of her teens.” But our horn rims were so fogged with detestation of Clinton that we couldn’t see how really detestable he was. If we had stayed our hand in the House of Representatives and treated the brute with shunning or calls for interventions to make him seek help, we might have chased him out of the White House. (Although this probably would have required a U.S. news media from a parallel universe.)

Such things as letting the abortion debate be turned against us and using the gravity of the impeachment process on something that required the fly-swat of pest control were strategic errors. Would that blame could be put on our strategies instead of ourselves. We have lived up to no principle of conservatism.

Government is bigger than ever. We have fattened the stalled ox and hatred therewith rather than dined on herbs where love (and the voter) is. Instead of flattening the Department of Education with a wrecking ball we let it stand as a pulpit for Bill Bennett. When–to switch metaphors yet again–such a white elephant is not discarded someone will eventually try to ride in the howdah on its back. One of our supposed own did. No Child Left Behind? What if they deserve to be left behind? What if they deserve a smack on the behind? A nationwide program to test whether kids are what? Stupid? You’ve got kids. Kids are stupid.

We railed at welfare and counted it a great victory when Bill Clinton confused a few poor people by making the rules more complicated. But the “French-bread lines” for the rich, the “terrapin soup kitchens,” continue their charity without stint.

The sludge and dreck of political muck-funds flowing to prosperous businesses and individuals have gotten deeper and more slippery and stink worse than ever with conservatives minding the sewage works of legislation.

Agriculture is a business that has been up to its bib overalls in politics since the first Thanksgiving dinner kickback to the Indians for subsidizing Pilgrim maize production with fish head fertilizer grants. But never, since the Mayflower knocked the rock in Plymouth, has anything as putrid as the Farm, Nutrition and Bioenergy Act of 2008 been spread upon the land. Just the name says it. There are no farms left. Not like the one grampa grew up on.

A “farm” today means 100,000 chickens in a space the size of a Motel 6 shower stall. If we cared anything about “nutrition” we would–to judge by the mountainous, jiggling flab of Americans–stop growing all food immediately. And “bioenergy” is a fraud of John Edwards-marital-fidelity proportions. Taxpayer money composted to produce a fuel made of alcohol that is more expensive than oil, more polluting than oil, and almost as bad as oil with vermouth and an olive. But this bill passed with bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress and was happily signed into law by President Bush. Now it’s going to cost us at least $285 billion. That’s about five times the gross domestic product of prewar Iraq. For what we will spend on the Farm, Nutrition and Bioenergy Act of 2008 we could have avoided the war in Iraq and simply bought a controlling interest in Saddam Hussein’s country.

Yes, we got a few tax breaks during the regimes of Reagan and W. But the government is still taking a third of our salary. Is the government doing a third of our job? Is the government doing a third of our dishes? Our laundry? Our vacuuming? When we go to Hooters is the government tending bar making sure that one out of three margaritas is on the house? If our spouse is feeling romantic and we’re tired, does the government come over to our house and take care of foreplay? (Actually, during the Clinton administration  .  .  .  )

Anyway, a low tax rate is not–never mind the rhetoric of every conservative politician–a bedrock principle of conservatism. The principle is fiscal responsibility.

Conservatives should never say to voters, “We can lower your taxes.” Conservatives should say to voters, “You can raise spending. You, the electorate, can, if you choose, have an infinite number of elaborate and expensive government programs. But we, the government, will have to pay for those programs. We have three ways to pay.

“We can inflate the currency, destroying your ability to plan for the future, wrecking the nation’s culture of thrift and common sense, and giving free rein to scallywags to borrow money for worthless scams and pay it back 10 cents on the dollar.

“We can raise taxes. If the taxes are levied across the board, money will be taken from everyone’s pocket, the economy will stagnate, and the poorest and least advantaged will be harmed the most. If the taxes are levied only on the wealthy, money will be taken from wealthy people’s pockets, hampering their capacity to make loans and investments, the economy will stagnate, and the poorest and the least advantaged will be harmed the most.

“And we can borrow, building up a massive national debt. This will cause all of the above things to happen plus it will fund Red Chinese nuclear submarines that will be popping up in San Francisco Bay to get some decent Szechwan take-out.”

Yes, this would make for longer and less pithy stump speeches. But we’d be showing ourselves to be men and women of principle. It might cost us, short-term. We might get knocked down for not whoring after bioenergy votes in the Iowa caucuses. But at least we wouldn’t land on our scruples. And we could get up again with dignity intact, dust ourselves off, and take another punch at the liberal bully-boys who want to snatch the citizenry’s freedom and tuck that freedom, like a trophy feather, into the hatbands of their greasy political bowlers.

But are we men and women of principle? And I don’t mean in the matter of tricky and private concerns like gay marriage. Civil marriage is an issue of contract law. A constitutional amendment against gay marriage? I don’t get it. How about a constitutional amendment against first marriages? Now we’re talking. No, I speak, once again, of the geological foundations of conservatism.

Where was the meum and the tuum in our shakedown of Washington lobbyists? It took a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives 40 years–from 1954 to 1994–to get that corrupt and arrogant. And we managed it in just 12. (Who says Republicans don’t have much on the ball?)

Our attitude toward immigration has been repulsive. Are we not pro-life? Are not immigrants alive? Unfortunately, no, a lot of them aren’t after attempting to cross our borders. Conservative immigration policies are as stupid as conservative attitudes are gross. Fence the border and give a huge boost to the Mexican ladder industry. Put the National Guard on the Rio Grande and know that U.S. troops are standing between you and yard care. George W. Bush, at his most beneficent, said if illegal immigrants wanted citizenship they would have to do three things: Pay taxes, learn English, and work in a meaningful job. Bush doesn’t meet two out of three of those qualifications. And where would you rather eat? At a Vietnamese restaurant? Or in the Ayn Rand Café? Hey, waiter, are the burgers any good? Atlas shrugged. (We would, however, be able to have a smoke at the latter establishment.)

To go from slime to the sublime, there are the lofty issues about which we never bothered to form enough principles to go out and break them. What is the coherent modern conservative foreign policy?

We may think of this as a post 9/11 problem, but it’s been with us all along. What was Reagan thinking, landing Marines in Lebanon to prop up the government of a country that didn’t have one? In 1984, I visited the site where the Marines were murdered. It was a beachfront bivouac overlooked on three sides by hills full of hostile Shiite militia. You’d urge your daughter to date Rosie O’Donnell before you’d put troops ashore in such a place.

Since the early 1980s I’ve been present at the conception (to use the polite term) of many of our foreign policy initiatives. Iran-contra was about as smart as using the U.S. Postal Service to get weapons to anti-Communists. And I notice Danny Ortega is back in power anyway. I had a look into the eyes of the future rulers of Afghanistan at a sura in Peshawar as the Soviets were withdrawing from Kabul. I would rather have had a beer with Leonid Brezhnev.

Fall of the Berlin wall? Being there was fun. Nations that flaked off of the Soviet Union in southeastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus? Being there was not so fun.

The aftermath of the Gulf war still makes me sick. Fine to save the fat, greedy Kuwaitis and the arrogant, grasping house of Saud, but to hell with the Shiites and Kurds of Iraq until they get some oil.

Then, half a generation later, when we returned with our armies, we expected to be greeted as liberators. And, damn it, we were. I was in Baghdad in April 2003. People were glad to see us, until they noticed that we’d forgotten to bring along any personnel or provisions to feed or doctor the survivors of shock and awe or to get their electricity and water running again. After that they got huffy and began stuffing dynamite down their pants before consulting with the occupying forces.

Is there a moral dimension to foreign policy in our political philosophy? Or do we just exist to help the world’s rich people make and keep their money? (And a fine job we’ve been doing of that lately.)

If we do have morals, where were they while Bosnians were slaughtered? And where were we while Clinton dithered over the massacres in Kosovo and decided, at last, to send the Serbs a message: Mess with the United States and we’ll wait six months, then bomb the country next to you. Of Rwanda, I cannot bear to think, let alone jest.

And now, to glue and screw the lid on our coffin, comes this financial crisis. For almost three decades we’ve been trying to teach average Americans to act like “stakeholders” in their economy. They learned. They’re crying and whining for government bailouts just like the billionaire stakeholders in banks and investment houses. Aid, I can assure you, will be forthcoming from President Obama.

Then average Americans will learn the wisdom of Ronald Reagan’s statement: “The ten most dangerous words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the federal government, and I’m here to help.’ ” Ask a Katrina survivor.

The left has no idea what’s going on in the financial crisis. And I honor their confusion. Jim Jerk down the road from me, with all the cars up on blocks in his front yard, falls behind in his mortgage payments, and the economy of Iceland implodes. I’m missing a few pieces of this puzzle myself.

Under constant political pressure, which went almost unresisted by conservatives, a lot of lousy mortgages that would never be repaid were handed out to Jim Jerk and his drinking buddies and all the ex-wives and single mothers with whom Jim and his pals have littered the nation.

Wall Street looked at the worthless paper and thought, “How can we make a buck off this?” The answer was to wrap it in a bow. Take a wide enough variety of lousy mortgages–some from the East, some from the West, some from the cities, some from the suburbs, some from shacks, some from McMansions–bundle them together and put pressure on the bond rating agencies to do fancy risk management math, and you get a “collateralized debt obligation” with a triple-A rating. Good as cash. Until it wasn’t.

Or, put another way, Wall Street was pulling the “room full of horse s–” trick. Brokerages were saying, “We’re going to sell you a room full of horse s–. And with that much horse s–, you just know there’s a pony in there somewhere.”

Anyway, it’s no use blaming Wall Street. Blaming Wall Street for being greedy is like scolding defensive linemen for being big and aggressive. The people on Wall Street never claimed to be public servants. They took no oath of office. They’re in it for the money. We pay them to be in it for the money. We don’t want our retirement accounts to get a 2 percent return. (Although that sounds pretty good at the moment.)

What will destroy our country and us is not the financial crisis but the fact that liberals think the free market is some kind of sect or cult, which conservatives have asked Americans to take on faith. That’s not what the free market is. The free market is just a measurement, a device to tell us what people are willing to pay for any given thing at any given moment. The free market is a bathroom scale. You may hate what you see when you step on the scale. “Jeeze, 230 pounds!” But you can’t pass a law making yourself weigh 185. Liberals think you can. And voters–all the voters, right up to the tippy-top corner office of Goldman Sachs–think so too.

We, the conservatives, who do understand the free market, had the responsibility to–as it were–foreclose upon this mess. The market is a measurement, but that measuring does not work to the advantage of a nation or its citizens unless the assessments of volume, circumference, and weight are conducted with transparency and under the rule of law. We’ve had the rule of law largely in our hands since 1980. Where is the transparency? It’s one more job we botched.

Although I must say we’re doing good work on our final task–attaching the garden hose to our car’s exhaust pipe and running it in through a vent window. Barack and Michelle will be by in a moment with some subsidized ethanol to top up our gas tank. And then we can turn the key.

P.J. O’Rourke is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

I’ve read a litany of blogs and commentary on the election and the results of the election. I still echo Radley Balko’s sentiments regarding the price the Republican party needed to pay for abandoning any notion of being fiscally responsible/conservative. The distortion of the concept of a laissez faire market into one that is expressly corporatist has led to huge problems in the economic and financial center, all while ballooning false markets into an economically disastrous explosion.

My issue with the direction of the Obama Presidency is that it hopes to continue the false expectations put in place by the Bush administration. In some ways he has a difficult road ahead, because to change the nature of the economic downturn he’ll either have to let the fallout begin or, as I mentioned in a previous posting, expand the intervention of government by continuing the Bush policies of extreme overspending in the hopes that there will be a turn around in the future that will somehow mitigate and continue the economic growth that was largely based on credit rather than an expansion in American earnings.

The other issue I have is the one of capitulation. The inability of the Democratic congress to enact anything that seemed to reflect the reasoning for being voted into office was troubling. There is an odd hope that the Democrats were just playing along to keep winning the elections without looking soft. Dailykos.com holds out that the Democrats will reverse all of these terrible choices in a sweeping fashion since now they have the power. That’s idiotic. They made choices for political expediency. To forgive those misgivings leads down the same road that allowed the Bush Presidency to grab huge amounts of power. “Expand now and we’ll cut back later.” Temporary power has a tendency to become permanent and to forgive that capitulation smacks of illogical partisanship. Democrats, your leaders need to be held to task for their decisions and votes. If I can’t have market liberalization then I’ll have to settle for civil liberties. The issue is that Democrats have been largely ineffective in rolling them back.

The bright future I hope for is one where Republicans divorce themselves from the socially conservative fundamentalist right and focus more on sound economic policy. At the very least they’ll learn to question executive authority. Hopefully they’ll get rid of any semblance to Karl Rove style politics and instead focus on real policy that creates actual freedom rather than fear-mongering.

Inevitably the US is a market based economy. No amount of argument that Democrats are “socialists” will change the fact that we will continue to be a market economy. For one thing, if universal healthcare is going to happen please contact your Democratic congressman and senators about the Healthy Americans Act. Google it. Read up on it. Read multiple perspectives on it. It’s a good solution that seems to avoid a lot of the pitfalls of our current system while still allowing market based plans to flourish without artificially forcing healthy people to pay more than they should as most community rating plans would, and in the end by offering individual subsidy it assists the needy without needlessly tying health insurance subsidy only to corporate benefits.

My last concern deals with environmental law. Because we are a market based economy the only way to push alternative ideas forward and allow them to flourish is to level the playing field. This means increasing energy costs for existing energy. Many mistakes have been made up to this point by backing the wrong thing. What is the right thing? We don’t know. If we knew the solution it’d be easy to implement. We don’t know. Something has to become competitive and the only way to push that is to level the playing field. The politicization of energy has caused some fundamental issues within the economy of the US that won’t be resolved by randomly picking “the best thing” and running with it without understanding how it fits in the big picture. To make it fit in a market economy means making existing energy more expensive. This will affect the poor the most. Heating oil, electricity, natural gas, gasoline, propane, everything will be more expensive in order to level the playing field with the alternative. It might be worth it, to those that can afford it, but to those that can’t…

Why the Republicans Must Lose
from Reason Magazine – All Reason Articles from the Past Year: Page 1 by rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko)
I grew up in a particularly conservative part of the already conservative state of Indiana. I voted for Bob Dole in 1996 and George Bush in 2000, generally because—though I’m not a conservative (I’m a libertarian)—I’d always thought the GOP was the party of limited government. By 2002, I was less sure of that. And by 2004, I was so fed up with the party that I did what I thought I’d never do—vote for an unabashed leftist for president.

Since then, “fed up” has soured to “given up.” The Republican Party has exiled its Goldwater-Reagan wing and given up all pretense of any allegiance to limited government. In the last eight years, the GOP has given us a monstrous new federal bureaucracy in the Department of Homeland Security. In the prescription drug benefit, it’s given us the largest new federal entitlement since the Johnson administration. Federal spending—even on items not related to war or national security—has soared. And we now get to watch as the party that’s supposed to be “free market” nationalizes huge chunks of the economy’s financial sector.

This isn’t to say that Barack Obama would be any better. Government would undoubtedly grow under his watch. And from my libertarian perspective, he has been increasingly disappointing even on the issues where he’s supposed to be good. We may not go to war with Iran in an Obama administration, but we’d likely become entrenched in a prolonged nation-building adventure in the Sudan. Obama’s vote on the FISA bill and telecom immunity also suggests that, for all his criticisms of President Bush’s use of executive power and assaults on civil liberties, Obama wouldn’t be much better. On the drug war, Obama has promised to end the federal raids on medical marijuana clinics in states that have legalized the drug for treatment, but he wants to resurrect failed federal criminal justice block grant programs that have had some disastrous effects on civil liberties.

While I’m not thrilled at the prospect of an Obama administration (especially with a friendly Congress), the Republicans still need to get their clocks cleaned in two weeks, for a couple of reasons.

First, they had their shot at holding power, and they failed. They’ve failed in staying true to their principles of limited government and free markets. They’ve failed in preventing elected leaders of their party from becoming corrupted by the trappings of power, and they’ve failed to hold those leaders accountable after the fact. Congressional Republicans failed to rein in the Bush administration’s naked bid to vastly expand the power of the presidency (a failure they’re going to come to regret should Obama take office in January). They failed to apply due scrutiny and skepticism to the administration’s claims before undertaking Congress’ most solemn task—sending the nation to war. I could go on.

As for the Bush administration, the only consistent principle we’ve seen from the White House over the last eight years is that of elevating the American president (and, I guess, the vice president) to that of an elected dictator. That isn’t hyperbole. This administration believes that on any issue that can remotely be tied to foreign policy or national security (and on quite a few other issues as well), the president has boundless, limitless, unchecked power to do anything he wants. They believe that on these matters, neither Congress nor the courts can restrain him.

That’s the second reason the GOP needs to lose. American voters need to send a clear, convincing repudiation of these dangerous ideas.

If they do lose, the GOP would be wise to regroup and rebuild from scratch, scrap the current leadership, and, most importantly, purge the party of the “national greatness,” neoconservative influence. Big-government conservatism has bloated the federal government, bogged us down in what will ultimately be a trillion-dollar war, and set us down the road to European-style socialism. It’s hard to think of how Obama could be worse. He’ll just be bad in different ways.

The truth is, unless you vote for a third-party candidate (which really isn’t a bad idea), you don’t have much of a choice this November. You can either endorse the idea of a massive, invasive, ever-encroaching federal government that’s used to promote center-left ideology, or you can endorse the idea of a massive, invasive, ever-encroaching federal government that’s used to promote center-right ideology.

Sadly, if the GOP does lose, it’s likely to be interpreted not as a repudiation of the GOP’s excesses, but as an endorsement of the Democrats’. When the only two parties who have a chance at winning both have a track record of expanding the size and scope of government, every election is likely to be interpreted as a win for big government—only the brand changes.

Voting yourself more freedom simply isn’t an option, at least if you want your vote to be taken seriously (and I’m not denigrating any third parties here; I’m just reflecting reality).

Which brings me back to why the Republicans need to get throttled: A humiliated, decimated GOP that rejuvenates and rebuilds around the principles of limited government, free markets, and rugged individualism is really the only chance for voters to possibly get a real choice in federal elections down the road.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that’s how the party will emerge from defeat. But the Republican Party in its current form has forfeited its right to govern.

Once we get past the present emergency, which requires immediate new investments, we have to break that cycle of debt.

Once we get past the present emergency, which requires new government intervention, we have to break the cycle of intrusion.

In order to stop this horrorible thing, we have to do the very thing that caused it more, but we’ll quit I promise.

I’ll have one last drink then I’ll stop.

I promise this time I’ll pay you back.

I’ll still love you afterwards.

Blah blah blah.

Mind you these statements were made in 1999.

Ron Paul in 1999 on the Current Crisis
Brian Doherty | October 21, 2008, 5:55pm

Especially interesting reading for those who blame, rightly or wrongly, Phil Gramm and his banking regulation reform for our financial mess. Ron Paul, the libertarian Republican, was against Gramm-Leach-Briley back in 1999, and here are some of his reasons why:

“today we are considering a bill aimed at modernizing the financial services industry through deregulation. It is a worthy goal which I support. However, this bill falls short of that goal. The negative aspects of this bill outweigh the benefits….”

“The growth in money and credit has outpaced both savings and economic growth. These inflationary pressures have been concentrated in asset prices, not consumer price inflation–keeping monetary policy too easy. This increase in asset prices has fueled domestic borrowing and spending.”
“Government policy and the increase in securitization are largely responsible for this bubble. In addition to loose monetary policies by the Federal Reserve, government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have contributed to the problem. The fourfold increases in their balance sheets from 1997 to 1998 boosted new home borrowings to more than $1.5 trillion in 1998, two-thirds of which were refinances which put an extra $15,000 in the pockets of consumers on average–and reduce risk for individual institutions while increasing risk for the system as a whole.”
“The rapidity and severity of changes in economic conditions can affect prospects for individual institutions more greatly than that of the overall economy. The Long Term Capital Management hedge fund is a prime example. New companies start and others fail every day. What is troubling with the hedge fund bailout was the governmental response and the increase in moral hazard.
This increased indication of the government’s eagerness to bail out highly-leveraged, risky and largely unregulated financial institutions bodes ill for the post S. 900 future as far as limiting taxpayer liability is concerned. LTCM isn’t even registered in the United States but the Cayman Islands!”
.”..My main reasons for voting against this bill are the expansion of the taxpayer liability and the introduction of even more regulations. The entire multi-hundred page S. 900 that reregulates rather than deregulates the financial sector could be replaced with a simple one-page bill.”

I wonder how many of Jacob Weisberg’s favorite economic thinkers and politicians were this prescient this long ago? Add this to the “it’s all the libertarians’ fault” file.

You can find the article at washingtonpost.com HERE

Is Capitalism Dead?
The market that failed was not exactly free.

IS THIS the end of American capitalism? As financial panic spread across the globe and governments scrambled to contain the damage, reality seemed to announce the doom of U.S.-style free markets and President Bush’s ideology. But this is wrong in two ways. The deregulation of U.S. financial markets did not reflect only the narrow ideology of a particular party or administration. And the problem with the U.S. economy, more than lack of regulation, has been government’s failure to control systemic risks that government itself helped to create. We are not witnessing a crisis of the free market but a crisis of distorted markets.

It’s true that the Bush administration has stood for light regulation of capital markets. But it did not invent this approach. By the middle of the last decade, experts across the spectrum believed that U.S. financial institutions faced outmoded restraints on their ability to innovate. Thus, the Clinton administration, supported by then-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, refused to tighten regulations on financial derivatives, memorably dubbed “financial weapons of mass destruction” by Warren Buffett. The 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, a Depression-era law separating commercial banking and investment banking, passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress and was signed into law by President Bill Clinton.

We’ll never know how this newly liberated financial sector might have performed on a playing field designed by Adam Smith. That’s because government interventions of all kinds, from the defense budget to farm supports, shaped the business environment. No subsidy would prove more fateful than the massive federal commitment to residential real estate — from the mortgage interest tax deduction to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to the Federal Reserve’s low interest rates under Mr. Greenspan. Unregulated derivatives known as credit-default swaps did accentuate the boom in mortgage-based investments, by allowing investors to transfer risk rather than setting aside cash reserves. But government helped make mortgages a purportedly sure thing in the first place. Home prices seemed to stand on a solid floor built by Washington.

Government support for housing was well-intentioned: Homeownership is a worthy goal. But when government favors a particular economic activity, however validly, it must seek countervailing control to ensure the sustainable use of public resources. This is why banks must meet capital requirements in return for federal deposit insurance. Congress did not apply this sound principle to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; they were allowed to engage in profitable but increasingly risky activities with an implicit government guarantee. The result was that taxpayers had to assume more than $5 trillion of their obligations. Contrast U.S. experience with that of Canada, where there is no mortgage interest deduction and the law requires insurance on any mortgage over 80 percent of a home’s purchase price. Delinquency rates at Canada’s seven largest banks are near historic lows.

The new capitalist model that emerges from this crisis must operate according to more consistent principles. The Fed should set interest rates with the long-run value of the dollar in mind. Government must be more selective about manipulating markets; over the long term, business works best when it is subject to market discipline alone. In those cases — and there will and should be some — in which government intervenes on behalf of social goals, its support must be counterbalanced with taxpayer protections and regulation. Government-sponsored, upside-only capitalism is the kind that’s in crisis today, and we say: Good riddance.

At this point I’m completely sick of the political dialogue that currently exists. It is ignorant, pointless, and a complete distraction from the problems with the country.

Rather than needlessly bashing politicians based on populist rhetoric I’m going to focus on causes to support. Early voting in Texas begins today. As such I have a link to the current ballot in Texas HERE. Please review this before voting. I highly suggest checking the voting history of the current group of candidates.

Here is a map of the current Texas Congressional Districts so you can find who your representative is if you don’t already know.

To find your Texas House Rep go here.

There are resources to look at the voting record of your Congressman, Senator, and Future President.

Washington Post

For the free trade crowd check out Cato’s Freetrade.org. It breaks it down by vote, but also gives a trade matrix. Even if you’re not into the free market thing, just shoot for a different spot on the matrix and review the economic voting record.

For other issues, check the thinktank’s respective website and they’re likely to have a voting record tabulation with regards to their position.

Some key votes I will be using to weigh the current group is the recent bailout votes, FISA, Patriot Act, Immigration, Farm Bill, and the Economic mindset of the congressman.

Please vote in an informed manner. Whatever you do, please don’t vote from the gut. Its pointless and helps to keep this country shackled to the idiocracy or feel good politics that in the end pats us on the head while pulling the rug out from under us, or worse yet, fettering us with the chains of bondage, all for the sake of power.

My analysis might be flawed, and even my lexical understanding of the market itself might be highly colored by analogous terms I understand better than econ speak but I think I know what’s happening.

Functionally everyone involved purchased things they could not afford and did so with easy credit that was available to them. Consumers did this, banks said they will give them the credit, the secondary mortgage companies like FNMA and FHLMC (Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac) who help provide the backing for these mortgages were complicit. These mortgages and other loan based credit are then bundled and sold to other financial groups/institutions as investments. The federal reserve helps regulate this by setting limits on fractional reserve style banking, and regulating the deposit based lending from banks. In this sytem we’re dealing with two types of monetary supply. The first is cash based created through the treasury, the other is in the form of interbank loans. The federal reserve determines the percentage interest rate at which banks can loan each other money to make sure they stay within the fractional reserve guidelines determined by their total deposit amount.

Clear as mud?

What happened? People bought more than they could afford. Whether is was a mortgage that they directly couldn’t afford or other things that contributed to their inability to pay back the loans/credit they had taken out. The economy has boomed recently because of the increased credit. As purchasing power increases due to increased credit available to everyone, more people purchase more things. Banks started holding much lower amounts of fractional reserve (deposit to loan ratio), and investors were more likely to purchased the bundled bonds. These investments get spread around to countries, international banks, hedge funds, etc…

In this case the inability to pay means that those providing the money for the loans will lose money. These bonds and bundles are normally grouped to minimize this, but when a vast percentage of people cannot meet their financial obligations we find ourselves in the current situation. If no one can pay the price for the current market of houses, then the values of those homes and other goods/services will come down. Dropping value of assets combined with an inability for the consumers to follow through on the initial purchase price and you have dissappearing money. The bond holders and purchasers of the bundles lose money. They are then less likely to purchase more bonds. Credit tightens and that economic boom based on credit dries up. Less things will be sold. Less money will change hands.

The bubble burst. What the $700 billion dollar bailout does is it give the Treasury the authority to purchase $700 billion of those securities to provide financial backing to the institutions that created those loans. This doesn’t mean it would cost the taxpayer $700 billion, since there would be some return on investment. My issue is the power it would give the treasury. It opens up the door to even more cronyism in government finance. It might assuage things… but what it was meant to do was to inspire confidence in the financial market.

It failed already.

Wall Street continued to take a huge dump after a slight boost when it passed the Senate. People are pulling their securities investments, taking huge losses in the process. Every investment based company is affected.

Foreign companies and government also purchased these securities and are hurting. The huge monetary supply of the US acts as a cushion, but other countries are going to be hit just as hard.

Credit will be harder to come by, prices will go down, failing companies will shed workers, and the baby-boomers who are now retiring are going to have to rethink how they’re going to retire.

There is a mortgage crisis. That huge crash you hear is only the market correcting itself. In this case it was allowed to grow far too large, and the subsequent economic downturn and market correction are going to come at a huge cost. Even so, buoyed by the weak dollar and increased exports the US has yet to have a single quarter of reduced output. A house is not an investment, yet there’s an entire generation of people who thought it was.

The “recession” is a combination of increasing gas and food prices and decreased asset value due to the housing correction currently taking place. Combine flawed regulation, bad US monetary policy, consumer perception about the housing market, the perception of easy money from reinsurers, and terrible underwriting practice by everyone involved and you have our current situation.

The best thing the US could learn from Europe is how to run a central bank. Controlling inflation should be the top priority rather than fueling economic booms and trying to soften busts. From 2002 – 2006 the top 1% of earners in the US had an average increase in income of 11%. For the remaining 99% there was an average increase of 2.4%. For the lowest 90% the average increase was 1%.

The moral of the story is, the news is full of crap. Everything you thought was happening in the last 6 years was a lie. Most things that are happening now are to your benefit unless you got an interest only loan, or took out an ARM and were planning to refinance. Most importantly, videogames are still only $60.

FYI. Most stats were yanked from this week’s economist.

It’s all over everything so I’ll refrain from posting a hundred links to reason, Andrew Sullivan’s blog, Cato, and everywhere else. I need to go check and see what the kossacks think about it.

It was neat to see the author of Eco-Scam: The False Prophets of Environmental Apocalypse to then say this in 2005.

Anyone still holding onto the idea that there is no global warming ought to hang it up. All data sets—satellite, surface, and balloon—have been pointing to rising global temperatures. In fact, they all have had upward-pointing arrows for nearly a decade.

You can read the full text at reason online.

Obviously they believe the private market should solve the issue, but there’s no real reason for them to do so. Their proposals, spoken through clenched teeth it seems, are either a cap and trade system or carbon taxes.

The only true effect of all this is to make a competitive market and begin to quanitify the negative externality of climate change as related to greenhouse gas emissions by energy producers. I suggest reading the article.