If Mamdani wants his affordability agenda to be more than a redistribution of this shrinking pie, he will need to recharge the private-sector engines of upward mobility. He can do that by confronting the occupational licensing and business regulations, land-use restrictions, and cost drivers that have made middle-class life in New York so hard to sustain.
-Michael Dresdale, from this essay
Already, the global chessboard looks unrecognizable.
And if the winners in this great reshuffling are not yet known, it’s easy to identify the losers.
That would be the national and transnational grandees who had pictured themselves as pillars of a “rules-based world order.”
These are elite types who worship at the altar of process: Every crisis must be papered over with consultations, negotiations and proclamations, until the public’s attention wanders and the trouble is decently shoved offstage.
Trump’s rage for change, for an actual outcome, feels to them threatening and immoral — a trampling on the proprieties.
In the rules-based world order, the point isn’t to defuse lethal situations like a hostile fanatical regime acquiring nuclear bombs — it’s to play-act at doing so, while adroitly turning present difficulties into someone else’s nightmare in the future.
Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out, and you're really buying into someone else's system of values, rules, and rewards.
-Bill Watterson, from his 1990 Commencement address at his alma mater, Kenyon College
A few more snippets:
A playful mind is inquisitive, and learning is fun. If you indulge your natural curiosity and retain a sense of fun in new experience, I think you’ll find it functions as a sort of shock absorber for the bumpy road ahead. . . .
We’re not really taught how to recreate constructively. We need to do more than find diversions; we need to restore and expand ourselves. Our idea of relaxing is all too often to plop down in front of the television set and let its pandering idiocy liquefy our brains. Shutting off the thought process is not rejuvenating; the mind is like a car battery — it recharges by running.
Psychologists have uncovered a number of mental shortcuts we employ in making our everyday judgments. Termed judgmental heuristics, these shortcuts operate in much the same fashion as the expensive=good rule, allowing for simplified thinking that works well most of the time but leaves us open to occasional, costly mistakes. Especially relevant to this book are those heuristics that tell us when to believe or do what we are asked. Consider, for example, the shortcut rule that goes, "If an expert says so, it must be true."
-Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
Perhaps the largest barrier to housing availability and affordability in places like California are permitting rules, land use restrictions, and construction codes that make it absurdly expensive, or even outright impossible, to construct new single or multi-family housing. Part of this is a conspiracy of current homeowners to protect and increase the value of their property -- after all, new home construction inevitably reduces their property value (or future escalation) by adding competing inventory and/or by creating congestion and loss of property-value-enhancing open space. Another part of this is "everything bagel liberalism" where every program has to achieve every Leftish goal -- eg we want new housing but it has to have solar and appliances with a minimum SEER and use recycled materials and have a certain number of units set aside for protected groups and create a conservation easement on part of the land, etc etc -- until even units that can get permitted are too expensive for all but the very wealthy.
-Warren Meyer, from this post
It is a curious fact that the earliest known set of laws, Hammurabi's Code, which dates back to around 1750 BC, is largely concerned with the regulation of interest. The Babylonian king codified existing credit practices with the customary interest rates set in stone—quite literally, since the Code survives for posterity engraved in cuneiform script on a basalt stele. . . .
Drawing up financial regulations is one thing but getting people to follow the spirit of the law is another matter. What we call 'regulatory arbitrage'—namely, the attempt by financial practitioners to evade regulation—turns out to be as old as the law itself.
-Edward Chancellor, The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest
My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) … the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.
Everyone hopes for an immediate solution, but the only solution to social problems comes through time. We in America always believe we have only to pass a law and everything will be changed. . . . People only obey a law the majority have already decided to obey, and it must be a very large majority.
-Louis L'Amour, Bendigo Shafter
People hunger for meaning.
The majority of them want to go home at night with the sense that their
presence that day made a positive difference.
-Michael Wade, from here
Williams also got the politicians. The Junto consistently elected Federalists to local seats—often by playing dirty. One corrupt practice of the era was called "making votes." Since many people couldn't meet the state's stringent property requirements, Federalist attorneys created fake deeds that voters presented to poll inspectors. "In this cursed crooked world," Williams wrote Ebenezer Foote, "if our institutions are worth preserving, we must preserve them by use of such means as alone can sustain them."
-James M. Bradley, Martin Van Buren: America's First Politician
.........................................worth making.
Chris highlights the problem with this quote attributed to C. S. Lewis:
While he was an early advocate for administrative power, Justice William O. Douglas explained that later in life he came to "realize that Congress defaulted when it left it up to an agency to do what the 'public interest' indicated should be done. 'Public interest' is too vague a standard to be left to free-wheeling administrators. They should be more closely confined to specific ends or goals." But that wish, too, seems now a world away. If laws governing major facets of our society were once largely the work of elected representatives and the product of democratic compromises, nowadays they often represent only the current thinking of relatively insulated agency officials in a distant city. It's a result that, as Justice Willliam J. Brennan, Jr., once observed, can post a quandary: "Whereas the colonists challenged the king, today's citizens may find it impossible to know exactly who is responsible."
-Neil Gorsuch, Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law
No matter how you slice it, the home building sector seems strangely slow given our population growth . . .
Brian Wesbury offers a pretty good take on why the housing market is so tight. He includes governmental hurdles as a major problem. Maybe. We think the major problem (that he fails to mention) is the wipe out of the small homebuilder - the company that would build 10-12 houses per year - after the 2008 meltdown. Those guys never recovered and/or aged out, and have not yet been replaced. We were so focused on sending all high school graduates to college, we forgot the importance of the building trades. There is still a screaming need for plumbers, electricians, carpenters, drywallers, etc. The earning potential for those high school graduates entering those trades now seems significantly higher than college graduates with BA degrees. Just saying. As an honorable mention for housing problems, we should not forget the serious inflation of building material costs that the covid/broken-supply-chain-years brought us. Prices have moderated a bit, but not much. All in all, no quick fix to the housing problem is on the horizon.
The leakage of prestige from politicized universities is overdue and wholesome. Those schools that once were preeminent and now are punchlines might soon have a bruising rendezvous with real politics, which, unlike the sandbox radicalism of campus playgrounds, can be serious.
-George Will, as excerpted here
........Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again? Likely too early to tell, but check this story on the Inflation Innovation Reduction Act.
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