An interesting thought

Via Megan McArdle - I'm not for this, but it would solve the problem.

My lunatic proposal for the day: why not make it easier to move homeowners out of homes they can't afford? Set up a streamlined foreclosure proceeding where a current or mildly delinquent homeowner can simply give the house to the bank and walk away. Do this with two legal provisos:

1. No tax on the forgiven loan

2. No black mark on the credit record. The bank marks the loan as fully satisfied.

Of course, if we decide to actually "fix" the problem we should loosen immigration and get people actually in the vacant houses.

So very true

Via Megan


More galling is the phony outrage from politicians about how the banks are actually spending the money.

Quick links

• Clever bailout commentary
• An interesting history of Shinseki
• Media entraps cops! -He might have opened up a mighty can of perjury worms. These scandals only seem to happen to the special teams, never to the regular copy.
  
• The Big Picture - photography
  

I hold my nose

I hold my nose, club my conscience, and smother my scruples and voted for Chambliss today. Barr's suggestion was important to me, enough to get me over my outrage at his campaign literature mentioning "Fiscal Responsibility".

Incidentally my polling place was deserted, which points to a substantial win for Chambliss.

Making little rocks out of big rocks

Sorry for the dreadfully light blogging lately - for the record, here is a short summation of my thoughts lately.

• Bush will issue between 150-200 pardons between now and when he leaves office
• I'm still furious about the bailouts
• I think my initial view of Obama, as being an excellent figurehead, with no fixed ideology, is coming into sharper focus.
• And this is the funniest commentary on the bailouts I've seen yet. It's a good indicator that popular opposition remains strong.
  

Quick Sunday link

• AtlHistory.com
• Obama Win Causes Obsessive Supporters To Realize How Empty Their Lives Are
• BailOutSleuth.com
• The new demographics of the two parties
• A very good post from McArdle on the Detroit bailout
• The biggest internet takedown in history - for a good cause no less
  

Good bailout commentary

Saturday night special

• Inequality and the Sergei Brin effect - self selection on a grand scale
  
• What Paulson might get out of the bailouts
• Cobb Country gets a tank - for real. I grew up there, and in general, the place makes Mayberry look like Escape from New York. Perhaps it's to quell the riots should (really, when) McCain lose.
• Tom puts it quite well with

  the penchant for blaming the problems on “greed” is the Great Chicago Fire on oxygen.

• My neighborhood makes the news. Apparently it's "rich in tolerance and diversity". I was not interviewed for it, though I still like it a lot.
  
• Rocksploitation now has a real music video - sort of.
  

4 things

• Wilkerson pegs the lack of ideology with McCain and Obama with

  McCain doctrine and Obama doctrine for use of force in humanitarian situations: Obama: There might be moral issues at stake. Surely we should stop Holocaust. Rwanda. Standing idly by diminishes us. Basically, I have no principle. I leave it at the discretion of my evolved moral intuition.

  Why do we have to guess what these people want to do?
  
• This graphic gets it right
• Death to the Four Year Degree - I've felt this way for a while actually.
  
• And we need this guy back again
  
  

Friday link clearing

Since these have been piling up in Firefox, here's what I've been reading

• Obama and the Born-Alive issue - ghoulish stuff. The controversy of abortion is where one draws the line on person vs potential person. Even the most ardent pro-choicers seem to draw it at birth, but it seems not everyone does.
• Via Will Wilkerson

  Obama terrifies me: an intelligent, thoughtful, well-prepared, capably extemporaneous man ascribing a future holocaust to some sort of non-existent, fantastical, steroidal Iran; talking about unsanctioned cross-border incursions into Pakistan because we found bin Laden, or some such, and must “take him out”; warbling around about “main street” while, in a lawerly, circumlocutory way signaling that he’s ultimately going to get behind hundred-billion-dollar cash bailouts to institutions that ought to be dismantled, destroyed, scattered to the wind. He wants GM to make electric cars. He wants the American people to know that he will appear before them to make extravagant xenophobic declarations in order to assuage their insecurity about the rise of other competing economies. He does this all in a calm, perfectly reasonable manner, with a convincing boardroom demeanor, and judging by the reactions of my liberal friends, with whom I listened, this was basically pleasing to them.

  McCain is of course out of his mind: forgetful, vicious, reactionary. And his ideas are even crazier than BO’s, but there’s a certain comfort in the fact that their insanity is laid so plainly and mercilessly bare by the grinning psychopath’s delivery. He provides no quarter for those who want to convince themselves that by Killing People for Their Own Good we are not actually killing them, or that by suborning corporate malfeasance we are combating it, or that by desperately seeking to maintain the geography of radial sprawl and the automobile we are seeking “energy independence.”

  I've had the thought lately regarding McCain, Bush, and bailouts - if we're going to have corporate socialism shouldn't we have a Democrat do it? At least they don't have the supposed association with the free market that Republicans do.
• David Friedman on the bailout

  The failure of a firm doesn't wipe out wealth, except to the extent that the firm itself—its firm culture, web of relationships and such—has some value. When a firm fails, that is at least some evidence that that value was negative, which is why nobody chose to buy out the firm and keep it going. The ordinary assets of the firm—its buildings, land, stocks, bonds, mortgages, and whatever it owns—don't vanish when the firm fails, they get sold to someone else.
  
  The bailout is not a way of preventing the loss of value. The loss (or transfer) of value occurred when people made bad mortgage loans. What happened more recently was the recognition of that loss. All the bailout can do is to shift the loss from some people to others, from the stockholders and creditors of firms that are now effectively bankrupt to the taxpayers.
  

Thursday link roundup

• Church Sign Wars - very good
• What Russia Wants - written by my old Boss at Cato
  
• The path to citizenship - it makes illegal immigration much more understandable
• Making money twice - a very good read
• Julian Sanchez put it very well with

  we’re perpetually told the fundamental cause of the ongoing meltdown is Wall Street “greed,” as though that somehow counted as an explanation. How, pray, would we describe it if mortgage lenders had rejected many more applications from lower-income folks, on the grounds that they were poor risks? Well, greed, of course. Pretty much whatever they did, they’d be doing because they expected it to maximize their profit; the issue is their judgement, not their motives. Or put another way: The problem isn’t that people were greedy, it’s that they weren’t very good at being greedy.

• Ron Paul fades into further irrelevance
• More Bailout - Yglesias posits what is hopefully a liberal dilemma

  Simply put, if congressional Democrats manage to acquiesce in a plan that spends $700 billion on a bailout while doing nothing for average working people and giving the taxpayer virtually no upside in a way that guarantees that even electoral victory would give an Obama administration no resources with which to implement a progressive domestic agenda in 2009 then everyone’s going to have to give serious consideration to becoming a pretty hard-core libertarian.

• A nice article on Obama's community organizing days - notices the lack of anything measurable.
  

Marginal Revolution gets it right

With this photo.

One would think that it's obvious that the government doesn't get Big Looming Threats pegged too accurately, but apparently not. The fact that people still push for national health care in light of all recent evidence of government capabilities is amazing.

The post of the day

From Marginal Revolution

Thanks goodness we bailed out Bear Stearns back in March if we hadn't we might have lost Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and who knows what else. Oh wait...