you sure have that right Justin, the bankers are holding on to these bad properties like they are gold.I bet they will be taking down these empty buildings, rather the let the market find its true bottum price.

I think it’s a silly idea anyway.  a cabin

Y’all have to admit - Oscar Wildebeest is funny!  That should be “glutician”, though, Oscar.

Well he is a log cabin Republican after all…

Justin, you’re yet another victim of the Keynesian economic system our mendacious politicians and their banker-bureacrat cronies. (who, amongst their godlike ability to produce “viable statistics” to misrepresent the crises they perpetrate, can also fly, walk on water, and shoot searing rays from their eyes.)

check out for a cabin in northern saskatchewan where you might find something in yer price range.. might be a tad cold for ya though.. you could always more further north and marry an eskimo..

Even NorCal has blown up, huh? Beautiful place it is, you know.

Who in inflationary credit bubble implosion times is not bitter?

give it a year—they’ll be dumping properties left and right

better yet, get a plot of land and build a little “katrina cottage”

joe allen “Well he is a log cabin Republican after all… “

what do you mean?

just kidding

uggh.  buchanan piles on obama today.  way to go out on a limb there pat.  god forbid your “base”, who voted for bush over you, is even discussed.  rockwell and co threw the paul campaign away because of these same old crackers, who apparently wield much influence in the flyover states

lester: Pat Buchanan has been beating up on McCain and Bush in his last 2 columns. Obama maybe a lesser evil but he is still very evil. He is surounded by radicals. The only thing he has going for him is that he stole Ron Paul’s speeches on Iraq. That’s what has propelled him into the lead.

Justin, I’d call it poetic justice, when a self proclaimed “libertarian” like you gets screwed by the real estate bubble and inevitable bailout by the FED, given the whole dang thing was orchestrated by Greenspan,---who as a member of the cult of Ayn Rand’s inner circle back in the 1970’s in NYC.

It’s even more poetic justice, given you are so inspired by the “virtue of selfishness” of your intellectual hero, Ayn Rand.

What did you think that “selfishness” was all about?

Of course, we’re hearing from all the apologists for the “free market” about how wonderful this weird combination of free market fundamentalism--defined as the utopian idealism that the unfettered free market always moves toward balance and equilibrium---combined the Milton Friedman “monetarism” that enabled the FED to create unlimited credit to bail out the booms and busts that are the reality of the <sic> “free market”.

So watching you get screwed by the whole process just is really juicy.

Of course, who is really getting screwed by this is the working class guy who saves and scrimps the 20% to buy a regular mortgage, and then drives around in an old car to pay his mortgage while his wife works at the local drug store to keep the household budget in balance. And then he watches the “libertarian” down the street buy into a better house with no-down payment low interest loan, who takes out a second mortgage to buy a new pickup truck, get bailed out of his “selfishness” by the government.

When you start to admit that “laissez faire” is a lot of crapola, then you might be able to get a clue about how this system of “free enterprise” really works.  And how it works---in reality, not the utopianism of your heros like Von Mises, Hayek and Rothbard---makes a mockery of you and your life of “activism”.

Tristian New sez: “Justin, you’re yet another victim of the Keynesian economic system our mendacious politicians and their banker-bureacrat cronies.”

Well Tristian, you’ve got your economic theories all mixed up…Keynesianism is entirely different then Milton Friedman’s “monetarism”.  Keynes said the Great Depression was caused by drop in consumer demand, and “Libertarian” <sic> Friedman got the Noble Prize for allegedly “proving” that the depression was caused by a mere drop in the money supply.

If you want to give credit for the real estate bubble, and the subsequent---and inevitable bailout by the government, look to Ayn Rand Cult member Alan Greenspan, who engineered the damn thing. And don’t forget to give credit to “free market” theorist, Milton Friedman---whose ideas fueled the growth of the power of the FED. And don’t forget the Neuter Gingrich “libertarian” Republican Congress who passed legislation “deregulating” the banking industry that turned middle class home mortgages into a speculative investment.

So thanks to fools like you who actually believe in all this “laissez faire” nonsense, we’ve got a political system that enshrines “free market fundamentalism” ----the completely idiotic and improvable belief that the unregulated “free” market always achieves a equilibrium”. In fact, the last 40 years has proved the opposite, from the S&L;bailout to the dot-con, to the mortgage derivative crisis. And of course, all this nonsense is fueled by the unlimited power of the FED to create credit from thin air--again thanks to folks like you and Justin, and the Ron Paul crowd.

It‘s all poetic justice when you get screwed by the very system you created.  Look all the “free market fundamentalism“ is all about is creating wealth for a few insiders---like Greenspan---by creating economic insecurity for the rest of us.

I’m trying to figure out of Joe Populist is being sarcastic or if he thinks we actually live in a capitalist country.

Butler sez: “I’m trying to figure out of Joe Populist is being sarcastic or if he thinks we actually live in a capitalist country.”

Are you another “libertarian” that has the Keynesian “welfare state” confused with the Miilton Freedom monetarism theory of easy credit funding personal greed as the shining path to personal freedom and unlimited materialist growth?

We definately live in a capitalist country, it’s just not the utopian fantasy of a “free market” that justin and his fellow free market fundamentalists believe it to be.

As for “capitalist countries”, Commie China is the fastest growing “capitalist” country, even though it has a repressive, authoritarian government. Capitalism doesn’t mean freedom, it never has.

Once you understand that, it will be a lot easier for you to understand what’s going on.

Joe Populist, the Keynesian welfare/warfare state and FED easy money go hand in hand. Since I am one of those fre market fundies you so deride, I am amused by your totally uninformed attacks on libertarianism..  C’mon, Joe, out with it - did a libertarian run off with your wife, or worse, take your favorite dog? Looking forward to the answer, as well as your idea of the proper economic framework we should operate under - hard currency, direct centgov money printing, major industries nationalized, and so forth.

Joe Populist reads like a guy called Joe that posts at Reason.com. He’s a unreconstructed liberal, so consider the source.

as for California cabin prices, I went to Donner Lake on I80 in the sierras and found a real estate company. The lowest price shack in the MLS was $399,000!!!!One bedroom, no waterfront.

This recession is going to continue until the housing market finds a bottom, and that won’t be soon.

On foreclosures in a depression when, you have cash or good credit never offer more than fifty percent, you might get it.You have to do your homework and look at many properties.It doesn’t hurt to go to foreclosure auctions at the sheriff’s dept.Study the deal don’t jump early.

Tregarth sed: “Joe Populist, the Keynesian welfare/warfare state and FED easy money go hand in hand….”

Well, not really. Milton Friedman supposedly disproved Keynes on the great depression, and won the Noble Prize for allegedly proving that the whole mess was created by a contraction in the money supply, not overproduction.  After that, public spending was out, and easy credit was in. The rest is history.

What has created the deficit mess we are was not Keynes--which is old hat, but “liberatarian” supply side economics. It is supply side economics--also free market gobbly-gook---that has created the huge increase in deficit spending that have plagued the US economy since Reagan. 

As silly as the Laffler curve was---as is most of the free market fundamentalist garbage that comes out of the “libertarian” right---you have to at least acknowledge that supply side theory advocated paying for tax cuts with spending cuts.  But defeating the “evil empire” was more important to Reagan than making the defense cuts that were necessary to fund his tax cuts, and we got huge deficits.

Bush2 took this crapola to new heights with his tax cuts, which were really funded by spending the Social Security payroll tax surplus---and of course his “war on terrorism”….

In fact, “Libertarian” political economy is plainly now the new “free lunch” ---the idea that we can merely cut taxes without cutting spending, and magically---we say magically because supply side “libertarian political economy is largely based on voodoo---there was supposed to be enough growth to generate enough new tax revenue to offset the deficits they created.

The truth is the from Reagan on, supply side has never worked, it’s never created enough new growth to replace the tax revenue that it consumed. Like most so-called “free market” economic theory, it’s all bull-toss.

So you see, Mr. Tregarth, all of the problems we see now, have nothing to do with Keynesian economics, and everything to do with “libertarian”--or voodoo---economics. For a taste of reality, I’d suggest you dig up David Stockman’s old book, The Triumph of Politics, and you might learn how idiotic Reaganomics was, and how much “free market” economics is based on ideological nonsense.

Mr. Allen sed: “Joe Populist reads like a guy called Joe that posts at Reason.com. He’s a unreconstructed liberal, so consider the source.”

Simon Tregarth sed: C’mon, Joe, out with it - did a libertarian run off with your wife, or worse, take your favorite dog? Looking forward to the answer, as well as your idea of the proper economic framework we should operate under -

No relation, Mr Allen. Don’t haunt Reason.com.

In my youth, Mr. Tregarth, I was a “libertarian” I must admit, and used to attend the seminars by the Society for Individual Liberty where we talked about anarcho-capitalism. So I’m well acquainted with the works of Hayek, Von Mises, Ayn Rand, and Rothbard.  Takes one to know one, I guess.

As for the proper economic framework--well, I’m now a firm advocate of the mixed economy, economic nationalism, state capitalism, or whatever you like to call it.  I like strong labor unions, big business and stringent regulation of finance capitalists.  I’d probably like to dump the FED--because it is actually “privatized money”---as much as the Ron Paulettes want to deny it.  I like Pat Buchanan on social issues and Ralph Nader on economic issues. Generally, I don’t see much difference between the Republican Party and the Democrats on much of anything important. Republicans talk like populists, but govern like plutocrats, while the Democrats are so mixed up on McGovern era “Identity Politics” that they are hopeless.

If that makes me a “liberal” Mr. Allen, then you are nuts.

What’s interesting is the similarities between communist ideologues and free market ideologues----if Kirk was right that real conservatives is the negation and rejection of ideology, then by right, real conservatives should kick the “libertarians” out of their movement. Commies and “Libertarians” are mirror images of each other, religious like zealots interpreting reality by a rigid set of ideological garbage rather then acknowledging reality.

Like the commies that deny that Soviet Russia was “real” communism, the “libertarians” like Justin like to deny that the mess we are in now, is not “real” capitalism, and that all the ‘deregulation” they have advocated for 40 years is now biting them in the ass.

Wow. That’s a lot of hostility. Are you a marginal home-buyer too?

Supply side economics are not libertarian. SSE was invented by Arthur Laffer, a mixed-economy advocate like yourself. There id a famous youtube going around from last November when Laffer debated Austrian Peter Schiff, predicting smooth saining and a goldilox economy. It’s pretty funny to watch. Peter Sciff, BTW is Ron Paul’s chief economic advisor.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfascZSTU4o

Sorry for all the typos. I guess it’s bedtime.

JP, I appreciate the clarification of your viewpoints.  Our stances are about 160 degreees out of phase, so it useless to continue this discussion unless we wish to turn this into a JP - ST thread.  I do recommend to you and those who share some or all of your positions to visit sites such as http://www.lewrockwell.com or http://www.strike-the-root.com to see if your ideas or libertarianism represent a clearer view of reality.  Cheers.  ST

The state is absolutely rational inasmuch as it is the actuality of the substantial will which it possesses in the particular self-consciousness once that consciousness has been raised to consciousness of its universality. This substantial unity is an absolute unmoved end in itself, in which freedom comes into its supreme right. On the other hand this final end has supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the state. - Hegel, Philosophy of the Right

real conservatives should kick the “libertarians” out of their movement.

I hope that the Libertarians leave of their own accord.

Joe Populist’s description of Conservatism as a mixed/command economy is in the tradition of Bismark, and is spot on. State intervention in social affairs as per Pat Buchanan, and economic affairs as per Ralph Nader is a good approximation of that tradition.

What does Libertarianism have to do with this? This ongoing experiment in fusionism is tanking - and the reactionaries are reverting to true form. Justin, I think that you should get a few evening stints behind the counter at Bound Together Books. Mix it up a bit.

Obama-con Schmobama-con; all the cute little parenthetical dismissals on that link aside, there is a very clear threshold for my support for that joker:

1. STOP SUPPORTING/DEFENDING ISRAEL
2. STOP THE THREATS ABOUT “CONFRONTING IRAN” AS THOUGH THEIR NUKE PROGRAM IS UNLAWFUL
3. STOP ALL FOREIGN AID

Were he to do even two of those three I might consider dropping my last requirement:
4. STOP BELONGING TO THE DEMOCRATIC (or Republican) PARTY

It’s really not so much - hell I’m offering a major compromise here in view of the desperateness of the situation, but c’mon now, we all know the score:
Don’t even think once; it aint gonna happen.

JP: your understanding of libertarian ideas is deeply at odds with mine.  I tell people
that the essence of libertarianism is: You may do as you wish with your life and your
property as long as you do not forcibly interfere with anyone else’s life or property.
That certainly does not describe the orientation of the American government in the last
50 years, so I find it impossible to lay the blame for our current economic mess at the
feet of libertarianism.
Perhaps you were trying to describe fascism and just got the label wrong?

I’ll bet Joe Populist is some deadbeat communist from the Larouche cult.  They’ve spent their entire lives trying to seize the reins of power in Washington but have only managed to become lackeys for Hillary Clinton.

>I’ll bet Joe Populist is some deadbeat communist from the Larouche cult.

Interesting call.

There is more than a whiff of Lyndon Larouche about the ol’ boy.

A cabin, eh? Hey, we’ve lived in one for 25 years, and not to “retire to”, either. It’s as if we knew (back in the early 80s) what was coming. Live in far west Texas (Big Bend country). Maybe my website can help: http://www.somethinghappeninghere.net

P.S. Do you honestly think Obama can make it all better?

Justin, it’s time to permanently put the People’s Republic of Californicate in your rearview mirror—as more than 100,000 Americans do annually—before it becomes a de facto province of Mexico. You’ll save a bundle by finding a cabin near Reno (no income tax in Nevada) or southern Oregon (no sales tax). At the same time, you’ll be able to scale down the quarterly pledge drive at Antiwar.com to $50K or so.