It's just my opinion, I could be wrong

Opening note: Apologies to readers for which Greece's problems are not interesting; they are interesting to me, so I'm blogging about them. It's strange to me, other than as a political game, that the EU/IMF would even be considering "bailing out" Greece. For starters, it's clear that the country has economic problems, the extent of which are probably not even acknowledged to-date, and which are largely due to their unfunded social support obligations and their largely socialist system (hm... remind you of anyone else?). That's a big problem, to be sure, and will need to be addressed if the country is to recover and become financial solvent. The second problem is that the "bailout" isn't really one, it's just some money to extend and pretend; it doesn't address the structural problems directly, and although the EU is negotiating to have austerity measures attached to any handouts, these are far from a sure-thing to be implemented or s...

The debt situation in Greece is interesting to me, not just because it represents an interesting dynamic in national solvency and international economics, but also for highlighting the need to have dynamic currencies, particularly for countries which cannot spend within their means (which, for practical purposes, is all countries). Inevitably, eventually, for those countries, you will encounter a situation where you need to effectively print more money to cover you spending obligations; it's a pretty common thing, and is generally accepted by people as a necessary consequence for any fiat currency system. This isn't the end of the country, or even all that bad, it just devalues the rest of the currency proportionally, and life goes on. In the case of Greece, however, they have created a situation which is unsustainable. On the one hand, they have signed on to a currency which is cross country and cross economy, which they cannot arbitrarily and unilaterally devalue. On the othe...

When considering any sort of government "reform", there's always a philosophical fine line. On the one hand, it's beneficial for the government to help people, solve problems, and prevent the sort of financial disruptions which endanger the market and ruin people's lives. On the other hand, it would be better to do nothing at all than allow the circumstances to be used as an excuse to enact unrelated takeover policies, give more power to ineffectual or corrupt organizations, and/or abuse the rights of the people under the guise of "security" or "stability". In that spirit, it's my hope that my musings will fall on the former side of the philosophical line, in stark contrast to everything being enacted and proposed by the contemptible scum in Congress, which clearly and repeatedly falls overwhelmingly more on the latter side. So, then, how to prevent future housing bubbles/pops, if indeed possible, without pissing on the Constitution? I woul...

I've been meaning to make this post for a little bit, kinda as a public service (for the infinitesimal subsection of the public who will read it, I guess). The basic idea is that since no single person is going to fix our government, and creating a new political party which embodies the libertarian ideals of the Tea Party movement is probably counter-productive in our political system, what would probably be the most effective is trying to support candidates who ascribe to certain ideals which match those of the Tea Party, and/or would likely lead to fixes in the government if upheld. Of course, everyone has their own opinions of what those pledges/ideals should be; some are short-term reactionary to current events, some are fringe, some are good, and some are not obvious, and there are many others. The fringe ones are the most dangerous, of course, since they divide the movement and weaken the effect of promoting change. However, the short-term reactionary and small-scale pledges ...

So I came across this news report , which, by itself, isn't particularly newsworthy. Basically, a guy on a message board claimed to be laying off someone because he (the employee) was an Obama supporter, and Obamacare was going to cost the medical business a lot of money, and people need to understand that [political] actions have consequences. There was also some general semi-founded ranting about Obamacare, and not much else to the story... but it got me thinking. I've ranted before about the problem, especially in a representative democracy, of people being unable to correlate the consequences of their political actions to real-world changes. In a high-level sense, this might be an area where employers could really make a positive contribution to enforcing the correlation directly: by laying off people who indirectly created the business need to lay off people (eg: by voting for socialists), a business owner would be aptly rewarding people for their political actions. After ...

Paul Volcker is a smart guy, who got duped into being a stool pigeon for the Obama administration under the guise of having influence on fiscal policy. Among other things, this makes him a great target for liberal media elements, who delight in distorting his speeches into supporting their agenda. For example, consider a speech today , in which Volcker made the otherwise innocuous observation that "at the end of the day", if the country is going broke and needs money, they must increase taxes to get it, and may need to explore other taxation schemes to fund every increasing entitlement programs and special-interest drags on the economy (such as cap-and-tax and other proposed programs). Simple, truthful, and direct... but probably not such a good idea. Reuters US wrote this up as: Volcker advises raising taxes, implementing Europe-style VAT. Their report could be the poster child for liberal media distortion, since Volcker was basically advising the exact opposite (ie: control...