Is Orren Boyle running GM?

Atlas Shrugged is kind of like 1984, Animal Farm, Brave New World, and Lord of the Flies. These are books that show what yucky things can happen to a country when folks aren't paying attention, or aren't paying attention to the right things. There's been a lot of 1984 in the post-9/11 US of A, but the 2008 crash and subsequent government response are basically a 300 million man reenactment of Atlas Shrugged. I half expect to find in a few years' time that a few hundred Austrian Economists have been lead to a gulch by Ron Paul and his wacky followers. As the interesting dude I met downtown said after predicting a massive earth quake on Christmas, "hopefully I'm wrong."

Hooray for Nintendo

An old story, but a good one, about the awesomeness that is Nintendo. Lady has a problem with her Wii (no, that's not a euphemism for anything disconcerting), calls customer service, finds out she's near their campus and gets to pay a visit to Nintendoland. One wonders if the Cupertinoids of the world would get the same service for their iGear.

Headlines in combination

Snagged this shot while reading Google News yesterday. Cause and effect, perhaps?

Freedom isn't free

And neither was my lunch. But only one of them costs $500 billion a year. The Dutch are in many ways freer than we are (i.e., not just pot), and seem to spend way less on their military. Maybe we could get some better freedom for cheaper if we'd shop around a bit instead of going to that damn defense industrial complex megamart every time.

Another Inconvenient Truth

The Austrians would be way less irritating if they would quit calling it... Quoth Ron Paul:

However, despite the long-term damage to the economy inflicted by the government’s interference in the housing market, the government’s policies of diverting capital to other uses creates a short-term boom in housing. Like all artificially-created bubbles, the boom in housing prices cannot last forever. When housing prices fall, homeowners will experience difficulty as their equity is wiped out. Furthermore, the holders of the mortgage debt will also have a loss. These losses will be greater than they would have otherwise been had government policy not actively encouraged over-investment in housing.

Perhaps the Federal Reserve can stave off the day of reckoning by purchasing GSE debt and pumping liquidity into the housing market, but this cannot hold off the inevitable drop in the housing market forever. In fact, postponing the necessary but painful market corrections will only deepen the inevitable fall. The more people invested in the market, the greater the effects across the economy when the bubble bursts.

As noted earlier, what the Austrians are saying now is that hyper-inflation is on the way. Hopefully they'll be wrong this time. I guess we'll see.

On the auto bailout

This is as good a rip on the automaker bailout as I've seen

Christmas 2008

So we watched a lot of basketball and some movies, played with the dog, and had a tofurkey feast. Tofurkey is one of those things that sounds like it'll be awful, but then you try it and it beats your meager expectations. It's not great, but the hilarity of the thing makes up for a lot of taste deficiency. I never really liked real Turkey either, in fact I'd say that I prefer tofurkey, though on any given day I'd rather have something else than either one...