United Liberty

An article in the Sunday, March 15 edition of The Birmingham News, entitled “Lots crumble and mud flows”, discusses some of the complications resulting from the plethora of unfinished housing projects that have been put on hold in the current economic crisis. The problems include excessive runoff and mud flows, crumbling roads without a final seal coat, empty houses in various stages of construction, construction debris posing safety hazards, and other various forms of pollution. Curiously, nowhere in the article does its author acknowledge that most of these housing construction projects are the result of a housing bubble.

Barron’s has an article by Alan Abelson that expresses my sentiments better than I could today. Here’s the crux:

House prices, in our bloodshot view, have another 20% or so to fall before hitting bottom and, at the earliest, we’re talking sometime next year. And, possibly more important, a meaningful brightening of the current, profoundly bleak jobs picture, isn’t in the cards for certainly as long, if not longer.

A sad assessment of affairs, with which I agree.

Recently, I was in a discussion about a good friend of mine who serves in the Alabama legislature. In the conversation, I mentioned this individual and said you can count on that person to do what is right. They are the kind of people we need in the legislature. The other person with whom I was conversing would call themselves a conservative Republican, but immediately they began to discuss legislators and members of Congress. That individuals sole criterion for quality of an elected representative is the amount of money that elected representative brings back to their home area.

For generations, politicians have held onto office by boasting of money brought back into the district. Particularly distressing is that so-called conservative Republicans go to Congress with a vengeance to fight the leviathan of big government, but are soon lured into voting for unconstitutional spending because some of that money comes back to the district. Hence, we vote our way into the treasury and buy votes to re-elect us.

Our representatives have spent our huge federal revenues, have spent deeply into the Social Security Trust Fund, and then have borrowed to the gills to finance spending. The vast majority of funds spent are not authorized by the US Constitution. The vast borrowing sprees by our Federal Government have now reached foreign banks as a great portion of our national debt is held by international investors. Shockingly, lenders in Red China hold billions and billions of loans to the US Government. Congressman Ron Paul warned that Red China could wage economic warfare simply by dumping their vast holdings in US dollars.