Libercontrarian

Crushed between the wheels of capitalism and big government.

Now... what kind of rifle am I?

This is a BIIIIG surprise.

My regular reader (yes, you) will be floored when he reads this:

You are an AR-15!
Take What kind of rifle are you? today!
Created with Rum and Monkey's Personality Test Generator.

It's amazing - an HK P7 and the All American AR15!

posted by: underwhelmed at February 25, 2009 20:34 | link | comments (2) |

So, what kind of handgun are you?

As it turns out, I'm an H&K P7.

This is GOOD NEWS, I tell you, as I have been thinking of adding a P7M13 to my stable.

Go here and check...
 

 

 

 

posted by: underwhelmed at February 25, 2009 19:52 | link | comments |

A followup to the Housing Crisis piece I did a couple of days ago

I guest-post on Resurrection Song, a wide-ranging blog put up by a co-hort Rocky Mountain Blogger called zombyboy. I put the Housing Crisis post on RS a couple of days ago and its has stirred up a little conversation there. One of the respondents, Bob, had an interesting "add-on" comment that extended my idea by discussing the Credit Default Swaps and how they helped artifically induce an inflationary effect on the housing prices in this country. I responded with my take on that comment - here's the exchange:

Bob:

This wouldn’t be nearly the problem is is if there weren’t hundreds of trillions [of dollars] of redundant credit default swaps held by counterparties with no interest in the underlying credit.  Bad enough that bottom tranches of mortgage-backed securities were scooped up, restacked, and re-rated as new offerings, but then when those offerings defaulted, which was practically a given considering the garbage they were constructed of, CDS counterparties (many of them hedge funds) reaped record rewards for their speculation.  This is what brought AIG down, for example, and it magnified the risky mortgage problem many times over. 

But you’re right, now that the easy finance game isn’t so easy, of course we’ll see fewer buyers, buyers with less purchasing power, and housing declining in value to meet the buyers’ reduced purchasing ability.

My response:

Bob, you’ve adroitly touched on a key point here that I didn’t have the space to expand upon in a shortish blog posting - an extension of the unanticipated consequences of government-induced (not-market-created) finance forces. If you force companies to loan money based not on the typical market drivers (read: CRA), but instead out of “outcome-based desires” (i.e. Socialistic needs to bring unqualified borrowers into the market) you will eventually create a market for several unwise activities.

What kind of activities? Behaviors like what were exhibited by the banks in the sale of the CDS, which motivated lenders to offer more high-risk loans to unqualified parties (further falsely pumping up the mortgage industry), which caused ever more home-buyers to enter the market, snapping up ever-more-expensive homes that frankly, barring government intervention, would have been markedly cheaper. Behaviors like mortgage companies coming up with ridiculous ARM or “no-income, no job” loans, loans to illegal aliens, et al, with the ultimate goal of “hey, we’re going to sell this package of crummy loans off to other banks and misrepresent their risk profiles anyway, who cares if they can pay? We’ll be sitting on OUR chair when the music stops. Get that hot potato away from me!”

The whole point of my post (the part that Nathan seemed not to understand, no matter how it was explained to him) was that salaries had risen SLOWER than inflation (about 2% annually v. about 4% annually), and MANY TIMES slower than home prices. I attribute Artificial Housing Inflation to the CRA. Banks would have never gone down this path in the ‘70s and ‘80s if Jimmah Carter hadn’t forced them to. Once they created an industry around this misfit idea, they naturally applied their creative commercial talents and discovered a way to make money conforming to the regulation - by passing the risk onto others.

See what happens when Big Government mandates outcomes based on foolish premises?

Outcomes-based thinking will be a future topic for this blog. I am fascinated by the concept in a modern era, there are people who think that they can just do anything they want to get to whatever goal they wish to accomplish, whether or not it violates law, good taste, common sense, or time-worn experience.

They call those people "liberals."

posted by: underwhelmed at February 19, 2009 12:05 | link | comments |

Changes to come to this website

Folks, I have made a decision about my website - it will be moving.

You may have noticed a new look coming to this website just over the last couple of days. To be truthful, Motime is a difficult interface to work with, and I am looking forward to moving my website to a new service provider. I will likely be moving to either WordPress or Blogger, depending on feedback given me by other bloggers.

Stay tuned. I will provide forwarding links when the new site launches.

posted by: underwhelmed at February 18, 2009 13:55 | link | comments |

underwhelmed - My take on the housing crisis

What happened to home values, how they initiated the Housing Collapse of 2008, and what will happen…
 

I’ve been alive a while.

In that time, I’ve seen home prices skyrocket WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYY past the inflation rate for salaries.

My father used to make about $75k/yr in the early ‘80s working as a program manager for a satellite communications company. We bought our house at 248 Sand Dollar Road, Indialantic, FLA for $75k - a nice 4 bed, 2 bath ranch that was about 2300 sq. feet, five blocks from the beach, as well.

I would bet that the same position pays MAYBE $120k now, about a 60% increase in salary from 1983 to 2009 - annualized, about a 2% increase yearly. Inflation has been around 4% annualized until this last year. So right there, salaries aren’t keeping pace with housing.

The house just up the road at 158 Sand Dollar Road is on the market for $350k. This is a jump in “value” of 460%! If my father were alive today, to maintain the standard of living he had he would have to be making about what his house cost - $350k/yr. Who the hell has an income like that? Answer? NOBODY. Wiki reports it as less than 1% of the population.

All of this means the home values were artificially driven straight up to the moon by some market force, which had a far-reaching and gravely under-estimated effect on home values.

I noticed homes really start to increase in price (and a corresponding below-inflation-rate increase in personal disposable income) in the early ‘80’s. This corresponds to the timeframe for the Community Reinvestment Act’s (1976) side effects to be felt in the price of houses.

So the Federal Government decided to push unqualified people to enter the market. Naturally, that meant that a larger pool of buyers was competing for the same housing, which (surprise, surprise) artificially stacked values up by falsely propping up demand. Buyers who would have not come into the market at all, or buyers who would have used better judgement buying a home that would have matched their cash-flow were encouraged by the burgeoning market to “go out there and live the American Dream.” Even prudent buyers who purchased “just enough house” to get the job done still wound up overpaying for their homes, to their financial detriment.

The effect took a while for home buyers to realize, but for anybody who’s studied a little math, exponential growth can startle you with it’s cascading nature. We were in the “hockey stick” portion of the curve - and didn’t realize it. The market became a speculator’s game of “musical chairs,” with few sellers and buyers aware that the bottom would drop out as the pricing was unsustainable. Remember the oil speculators that were buying at $144/bbl this summer? They’re not doing too well with oil in the $40s, and the same thing happened to both speculators, real-estate professionals, and buyers in the housing industry.

Houses aren’t worth nearly as much as people think they are. The generalized notion I keep hearing from economists and real-estate professionals is that most homes are 15% - 18% over-valued. I have news for the folks who are saying this: I think that figure is the low-end of that range. I suspect the upper end of the range is closer to 60% over-valued.

We’re about to see a decade-long slide in housing values.

It will be unprecedented in economic history, and the economists will be scratching their heads about it for the next 30 years.

See what government meddling in business gets you? Unintended consequences.

And there you have it, my friends.

posted by: underwhelmed at February 18, 2009 00:19 | link | comments (2) |

Anyone see this on Hannity tonight? "Homegrown Jihad"

Hannity had the folks who've produced this documentary about Sheik Mubarak Gilani and his 35 training camps across the US. Most are located on the East Coast but one is located in southwest Colorado. Gilani's organization has been investigated by the Colorado Attorney General's office for his role in a number of underhanded, shady, and outright terroristic acts.

The organization called "Christian Action Network" created this film which features American Muslims training with weapons to perform various terrorist actions - victim disarmament, CQ dynamic room entries, carjackings, IED creation, placement, and detonation, firearms training of every sort. This is no bullshit; the producers have these people on tape training here at their sites in the U.S. for these actions.

I believe I have read that these guys are generally recruited in the despair pits of the American prison systems. Islamofascism offers them structure and respect, a thing never shown to these people previously, so they're attracted to it. They get out of prison and end up at these camps.

Pretty scary stuff. If it were ARFCOMMERS or conservatives or often-touted <gasp> right-wing militia, every third member would be an FBI guy, but when C.A.N. questioned U.S. law enforcement about it, they were not concerned, citing the rights of these American citizens to plot and plan armed revolt or terror on America's streets.

Maybe they have a plan - maybe there's informants, maybe these camps are a honey-trap for Islamo-loonies to be "rolled-up" before they do something really terrible, like The Perfect Day (think Beslan school tragedy, 2004).

At least, that's what I'm hoping.

posted by: underwhelmed at February 16, 2009 23:48 | link | comments |

I vote John Murtha be the first CongressCritter examined...

A fellow blogger, Dan Murphy of AuditCongress.com, has created his blog to petition the government to have the IRS audit high public officials each year. We're not talking the Assistant to the Undersecretary of Labor here - we're talking about guys like Tim Geitner, Rahm Emmanuel, Joe Biden, Barrack Obama, John Murtha... Hey, let's audit John Murtha! That area of the carpet could use a serious steam cleaning, and with good reason, says Clarice Feldman of Pajamas Media. From her article on the former-Marine-turned-scallywag:

---

In between skating on the Abscam charge and never really being held to account yet for slandering the troops, Murtha has used his position as chairman of the defense appropriations subcommittee of the House of Representatives to funnel well over a hundred million dollars in earmarks — largely but not exclusively on defense matters — to confederates in his district who return to him substantial campaign contributions which permit his repeated re-election to office. If you think this pork game is harmless, you are not paying close attention: the process deprives the Department of Defense of the right to obtain the best equipment at the best, most competitive price for the troops and saddles it with services performed by companies on which it does not wish to expend its allotted funds.

---

This is EXACTLY what Murphy is playing at with AuditCongress.com - placing The Untouchables into the Touch Zone. We The People should be able to view the year-by-year tax returns of our supposed betters, if for no other reason than to force them to prove that their financial behavior is beyond reproach.

After all, they expect (and will have investigators demand) the same from us - if you don't think so, just try not paying your taxes for a couple of years and see what happens to you.

I am frankly tired of Congressmen and Senators getting caught with tens of thousands of dollars in their freezers or receiving free houses from oil companies.

Aren't you tired of voting for them?

posted by: underwhelmed at February 12, 2009 15:50 | link | comments (1) |

Note to chattering class: "Shut yer pie hole, nobody cares how we waste your tax dollars."

Our overlords have spoken, and their Chief Vizier has told the Little People that they need to "stifle yaselves" with their objections to the Porkulus, er STIMULUS Bill.

Senator Charles Schumer, (D, as if you couldn't have guessed) New York, tells the so-called "chattering classes" (read: anyone who isn't a Senator or Congressman) that Americans don't care about the gigantic wads of long-wished-for funding for darling Left-wing causes in the nearly-trillion-dollar bill that's floating through Congress. Yes, that's right, Americans DON'T CARE what money the pols in D.C. throw into the meat-grinder of national political favors.

It's just our tax money, after all.

Keep glad-handing us, Senator. Keep pushing. If you do it long enough, maybe even the dim-witted citizens of your state might begin to see what an arrogant, empty-headed fool you are and cast you out.

posted by: underwhelmed at February 11, 2009 14:12 | link | comments |

Gosh - it looks like I haven't posted in a while

Funny that - I took some time off.

A little has happened in the intervening year. We've had the nation's first African American elected to the office of the President of the United States, the economy has gone completely into the wastebasket, and the nation appears to have taken a fairly sizable step to the Left.

On the firearms front, District of Columbia v. Heller  was decided in the favor of Heller in a game-changing decision on the Second Amendment from the United States Supreme Court, first since 1934's U.S. v. Miller. The confirmation of a citizen's right to keep and bear arms is a master-stroke for gun-rights advocates around the nation.

Yet I didn't comment on any of it!

Such is the life of an irresponsible blogger. I founded this site five years ago and set about to explore the world of blogging. I treated it like a personal journal at one point, as a site for political opinionating, and as a networking tool. I met an astonishingly prolific and diverse set of bloggers, corresponded with them, and posted my thoughts.

That was when I discovered that I didn't really have anything to say.

I started asking myself, "Who the hell are you, anyway, that any random stranger would want to read anything you've written? What knowledge do you bring to the table other than how to run your mouth? What's the (as my old bosses in the sales game would say) 'Value Added?' "

That's when I dropped off the radar. I tried to return a couple of times but just could not generate the passion. I found myself reading one of my gun forums and bringing some of the more interesting discussion topics here - then realized that I was parroting what other people were saying. Once in a while some issue would come up - the Stimulus Bill, Heller, the election, the war in Iraq, etc., but I would buzz around the blogosphere and read wonderful posts by my favorites, and thought, "What can I say that hasn't already been said by a more responsible and eloquent poster?

So you're probably asking yourself, "Why's he telling us this? If he doesn't care, why should I?"

This is a good question!

The answer is that I don't do this for you. I do this for ME. I am not here to bring readers; I have no commercial aims, and could not care less about influencing people to like me. I'm who I am - a guy challenged with day-to-day cares who has been paying more attention to his family and other issues. I guess I am not as committed as I once was. Perhaps if more people had regularly commented, or if I had managed to take a different course in my career, I would be more engaged.

Now that there have been some sea-changes in American politics and culture, I am feeling that need to offer my idiotic opinion again - look Ma! The loudmouth's gonna do it again! You can check back from time to time; I may do this daily or every other day. I have begun exercising again, so perhaps I can exercise my opinion as well. Maybe both will help me become a more holistically well-rounded person. We shall see!

posted by: underwhelmed at February 10, 2009 20:19 | link | comments |

Template by motime.com