Purple shirts:

August 9th, 2009

And so it begins: Purple shirts

In democracy, it is always a winning move to raise the ante, for example politicize car designs, or to politically determine who gets the job and who gets the promotion with the state enforcing political correctness in the workplace. Since democracy is all about building the biggest coalition, and splitting the other guys coalition, it always an advantage for political activists have more stuff, and more important stuff, politically determined.

And once what is at stake is large enough, it is always a winning move to become violent, and the only answer to violence by one faction is violence by the other, thus the end stage of democracy is exemplified by the Wiemar parties, where the major parties were the commies and the nazis, and all the other parties were necessarily remaking themselves into something very similar.

Hotair thinks this will rebound against the Obamessiah, but history tells us otherwise. People love the strong horse, and despise the weak horse, and beating people up looks very much like strength if you can get away with it.

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The vast majority of defaults were black and hispanic

August 7th, 2009

Hat tip Steve Sailer who provides the breakdown of defaults.

The proximate cause of the international crisis is that the US$, the international reserve currency, lost much credibility.  The proximate cause of the US$ losing credibility was massive defaults by blacks and Hispanics, and the proximate cause of the massive defaults by blacks and Hispanics was affirmative action lending to people whom I could tell at a glance from twenty paces were highly unlikely to repay their debts.

In the last days before the crash, I saw in California a steady parade of people buying expensive houses no money down whose own mothers must have been reluctant to lend them ten dollars. Lax though credit standards were, not one of them would have been able to borrow money had he been non Hispanic white.

Laderman and Reid of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco have done the unthinkably politically incorrect, and though they do not directly reveal the proportion of defaults that were affirmative action, they tell us:

We also find that race has an independent effect on foreclosure even after controlling for borrower income and credit score. In particular, African American borrowers were 3.3 times as likely as white borrowers to be in foreclosure, whereas Latino and Asian borrowers were 2.5 and 1.6 times respectively more likely to be in foreclosure as white borrowers.

They also argue that CRA loans were just fine:

a CRA lender significantly decreases the likelihood of foreclosure

They obtained this contradictory result by controlling for race – in other words, they are not saying CRA loans were unlikely to default, but that a CRA loan made to a non hispanic white is (unsurprisingly) unlikely to default – in other words, affirmative action loans have no harmful effect, indeed beneficial effect, to the extent that they were not in fact affirmative action loans.

They do not directly tell us what proportion of defaulters were black and Hispanic, but since the great majority of defaulters were subprime, and 77% of subprime borrowers were black and Hispanic, and blacks and Hispanics three times more likely to default than whites …

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The government can inflate its way out of debt

August 6th, 2009

The official, on the books, on budget US government debt is troublesomely large, and growing at an unprecedented rate, but it is not intolerably large, not so large as to be unpayable, not so large as to predict ruin.  The off the books, off budget deficit is considerably larger, and no one knows how large it is or how fast it is growing, which situation may well foreshadow national insolvency. Read the rest of this entry »

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Off budget deficit

August 4th, 2009

Long ago, the government found a new way to run a deficit:  Create a nominally private business with government appointed management, to carry out a government directed mission.  Read the rest of this entry »

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The nomenclatura

August 3rd, 2009

“Hot Air” has a wonderful post:“the peasant plan”.  It lists all the benevolent interventions your beloved leaders are imposing on you for your own good – and points out that each benevolent intervention either by its nature does not effect people like the beloved leaders themselves , or, as with the health plan, people like the beloved leaders are specifically exempted from this kindly help.

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“We may be seeing the beginning of the end of the recession”

July 31st, 2009

Obama sees end of recession
“We may be seeing the beginning of the end of the recession”, says Obama

It has become apparent that the way for economists to become important, respected, even get Nobel  prizes, is to tell politicians and bureaucrats what they want to hear, which is usually that there is sound economic reasons to do whatever pleases lobbyists, special interest groups, and strategically important voting blocks.

Here is Bernanke on the housing boom back before it burst – he is telling us that the there is no bubble, that the government inflating prices will not cause crash and recession – were he to tell us something different people might think that the government pressuring banks to throw trillions of dollars in the general direction of people of the politically correct race but economically incorrect credit rating might lead to serious problems.

That does not of course mean the recession is going to get worse.  What it does mean, however, is that all the very clever economic experts around Obama will tell him that things are going to be fine, regardless of whether they are going to be fine or not.

Because some of the people around Obama are crazies, notably his science Czar, craziness automatically becomes mainstream, and the good and the great start figuring out clever rationalizations why those programs are not crazy at all.

Well Obama has stuck his neck out a little, and made his prediction, so it is only fair that I stick my neck out and make my prediction: My prediction is for high unemployment, high inflation, or both, leading to ballot box stuffing and heavy intimidation of white and aged voters in the vicinity of the voting booth in 2010 and 2012

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Kaufman predicts soaring unemployment

July 27th, 2009

In U.S. Still Melting Jobs, Let’s Count The Ways Kaufman argues unemployment will continue to rise because of numerous hostile federal law changes and initiatives aimed against employers and entrepreneurship.

Meanwhile, the mainstream keeps predicting that unemployment is near maximum, that things will shortly start getting better.

I expect that the mainstream will be proven wrong.  You just cannot go forth and smash capitalism and expect everything will just continue to work fine – though as everything goes to hell, doubtless capitalism will be blamed, and Krugman and the rest will declare that they have been proven right – that all the bad things happening are proof that capitalism does not work and therefore they did not crush it enough.

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You are probably a federal felon

July 26th, 2009

There are a lot of laws, indeed they are growing so fast that not only can they not be read by legislators, but with in creasing frequency not even printed, existing only in electronic form, no longer practical to commit to paper.  Further, many of these laws are deliberately overbroad for the convenience of prosecutors

Thus for example  Krister Evertson was convicted of abandoning hazardous waste – notwithstanding the fact that the materials were not waste, nor abandoned, nor even stored unsafely.  The law is that someone’s materials, if hazardous, can constitute waste even if they are extremely valuable to him and under lock and key in secure storage, and once the EPA has broken into that secure storage using cutting torches, he has abandoned the materials.

A law that on its face appears to be about potentially hazardous chemicals dumped in a creek, also covers potentially hazardous chemicals on private property in locked chemical and criminal resistant stainless steel container.   And furthermore, nearly all chemicals have been declared hazardous.

The same is true of an enormous variety of other laws on other matters, laws that now multiply faster than is physically possible to print them – each law written to include all possible behavior that the state might possibly want to punish, not to exclude behavior that is innocent and honest.

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British political prisoners.

July 21st, 2009

Two british nazis, Simon Shappard and Stephen Whittle, were charged with writing heresy.  They fled to the USA, but last month were forced back to Britain, where they have each been jailed for two years and two months for publishing thought crimes:  They posted on their web site that Hitler did not exterminate the Jews, but that he should have. Read the rest of this entry »

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Goldman Sach’s hand caught in piggy bank.

July 17th, 2009

They admit their hand was in the piggy bank, but say they were just feeling the money, not stealing it. Read the rest of this entry »

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