Averaging over the entire US, a quick present discounted value calculation using that as the discount rate gives me an appropriate factor of about 1.8, so nationwide, we're talking about roughly an 11% overshoot nationwide. That's not so bad.
Boy, do a quick calculation for Slashdot and get totally hosed. I knew those numbers sounded fishy. Let's be naive and take those numbers as fixed rates for 30 years and compound the interest monthly. Let's assume that you value the home right now as much as you should value the sum of the present discounted values of your future stream of 360 payments (obviously, or you wouldn't agree to those terms). If my algebra is correct, then from 7.75% to 5.65% with the same monthly payment would give us just shy of a 25% bump in the current price (I'll have to revisit this later as I could be out to lunch again, but these techniques are pretty straightforward). Even a "mere" 80% increase is right out. Yikes.
You are obviously under age 40.;) There is a bit of history involved here, as true buyer agency is a relatively modern concept.
No, I know the history. I just don't think that pointing out which party remits the money is really any more helpful to the conversation than saying that half of your social security tax is picked up by your employer. It's a much more complicated story than that.
Perhaps. But good agents put in a lot of work for their clients and deserve to be compensated. No one is forcing you to use one, but if you don't, you'll have to do all that work yourself.
Oh, I'm certainly not arguing that having a real estate agent in the loop is without value. A house transaction is about as complicated a transaction as the average person will enter into, so having an expert who has your back is quite valuable given the money involved. As I said in another post, I think that competition from third parties who do nothing more than provide listings will probably help good Realtors over the long run. It will compete the do-nothings right out of business and improve the signal to noise ratio for those who actually provide significant value beyond doing a quick database search.
Of course, prices for Realtors have been on the decline. In many markets, paying 6-7% was the norm 10 years ago. Now, you can easily find an agent who will work for something more reasonable.
There are a few ways of looking at this, and I don't know the overall answer, but this piece goes into it a bit. Commissions are down as a percentage of the sale price, but have they changed in real dollars? There are a few variables at work here, and I'm trying to figure out which ones would dominate which markets. An agent could afford a lower percentage fee with either a higher priced houses or by moving more houses with the same effort.
Think about it. If financing that fee is the difference between being able to put 20% down or not, the buyer is going to get much better loan terms by putting 20% down and financing the cost of the Realtor.
I have no reason to doubt that this is true, but I can't really get my head around why a bank would do a loan that way. It wouldn't make sense to give me a good rate if I put 20% down on a $300K loan for a home worth $100K home and then used the additional $200K to pay for other transactions. Why would they let me do it on a smaller scale? They're essentially loaning me an additional unsecured $200K at the same terms they used for the secured $100K portion. It's a surprising behavior for the types of financial organizations that charge you a fee for using the ink in their printers.
A few years ago, I would have simply assumed that there was some clever reason based on accounting or economic fundamentals that sophisticated bankers were aware of that I wasn't. These days, I'm more inclined to think that it's just another policy that's not especially clever. That being said, if you can pull it off as a borrower, why not?
Nope. We have shown that people (you) are willing to over-pay for a home in a low-interest market and not willing to over-pay in a high-interest market.
No, we have shown that given the choice between overpaying $50K or overpaying $834K, I would chose to overpay $50K. That's a true and valid result, but it doesn't say much. What you're working around is what the total price is, not the base value. All else held equal, you as a consumer should be willing to pay the same amount out of pocket for a home at a low interest rate as you do at a high interest rate. The only difference would be what fraction of that total is principal and what fraction is interest.
The rest is finding where that line is, and that's a statistic we can't get between the two of us.
That's where we disagree. All else held equal, what a person is willing to pay in "sticker price" should move relatively predictably with interest rates because the analysis for a rational actor is relatively straightforward. If it does not, that means there's a factor other than the interest rate. It could be preferences for homes. It could be the ability of the average home buyer to do the necessary calculation. It could be a change in the risk premium that people put on homes or conversely, the expectation of future prices. But there is another variable.
My point was that there is some amount that people are willing to pay more for a home when the interest rate is lower.
That's absolutely true.
But that isn't quantifiable. So, how can you say that the effect isn't the primary cause?
But it is quantifiable assuming that home buyers in aggregate are rational actors acting on only the present discounted value of an investment. The reality is that the change in quantity observed does not match the change in quantity one would predict from a cold analysis of the numbers. That means some other variable is in play.
Let's take your $325K home example and assume 7% interest with no money down (for simplicity) over 30 years. Let's say that's the "correct" number for the current market. Let's flatten any assumptions about future interest rates, inflation, etc, and just do the straight up calculation. If you do that, what you're saying as a buyer is that the home is worth a pile of cash roughly $840K high. If we tweak the interest rate downward, the home is still worth that amount to you. You're just willing to pay a higher sale price for it. If the sale price adjusts to the point where suddenly the buyer is willing to pay $1M for it over 30 years, something has changed about your assumptions. This is the same type of calculation you'd do for a long term capital investment as a business or, as a lender, what you'd pay for a bond. It's all just some variation on a present discounted value calculation.
The whole sub-prime is about the homes being bought for more than they are worth now, and the interest rates increasing as the price decreases. People bought homes they couldn't afford because they could make the payments.
That's 100% correct. I'm not saying that the only speculation was on the part of the home buyers. By and large, the less sophisticated home buyers were just happy to get a home with payments they could afford. The lenders were clearly speculating, though. The only way such loans make sense is on the assumption that they'll almost certainly be paid back or that the loan would be backed by an asset that was increasing in price fast enough to cover some of the more exotic amortization schemes. You simply can't run the numbers on loans like that and get a result that makes sense without some pretty extreme assumptions about future home prices.
The "bubble" is that there are more people realizing they shouldn't have bought a house or the house they are in and are trying to sell. Someone
If you had a house payment of $2777 and could get a $166,234 home at 20% interest or a $1,000,000 home at 0$ interest, which would you pick?
If I had to pick one of the options, I would chose the 0% loan.
What if you knew that the $1,000,000 home was really only worth $950,000, but the payment was the same as the $166,234 house?
The answer wouldn't change.
Would you suck up the $50,000 to get a million dollar home for the price of a $200,000 home?
How do you do with that thought experiment?
Well, we could start by choosing a more reasonable comparison than 20% vs 0% and not assuming that the $1M home is only overvalued by ~5%. More to the point, given the option to spend $1M, is the most sensible thing to do with the money to buy an asset that's worth less than $1M with it? The fact that it compares favorably to an obviously suicidal financial decision isn't really all that impressive.
My point was not that lower interest rates don't justify some increase in home prices. My point is that the price increases we saw were not justified by the interest rate changes alone, and the price decreases we will see are likely to be more than those we'd expect from a simple shift in interest rates. An additional factor had to come into play. Barring a sudden change in the average American's preference for houses, the only rational explanation I can come up with is speculation. That is, the average buyer expected to see a higher growth rate on the value of a home than the average buyer from years ago did.
Not surprisingly those numbers agree with what I've been hearing from eager buyers over the past few years: "Buy now or be priced out forever!" "House prices only go up!" "They're not making land any more! Supply and demand!" Those claims didn't hold up to scrutiny then, and I'm not inclined to believe the shallow analysis of talking heads on TV who are calling today's prices a buying opportunity despite the fact that they're still well out of line with historical norms in most areas.
By this line of argument the "fault," if there is any, for the decline in housing prices needs to be laid at the door of the Federal Reserve.
I would phrase it slightly differently in that the fault* for rising house prices can be traced back to the Federal Reserve's actions, and the bubble that followed was an indirect result. There is a lot of investment cash floating around that's looking for "safe" investments, and low yields on those assets precipitated the huge increase in demand for mortgage backed securities. The fundamental problem is that there was more loanable money out there than people who were really qualified to borrow it. My understanding is that the companies that packaged these securities up had people pounding on their doors for more, even though the quality was declining as the market ran out of qualified borrowers.
I agree with you that the idea that low interest rates alone drove rational buyers to bid up home prices is not tenable. My thought experiment: Would I buy a home for several times what I thought it was worth and make payments for the rest of my life if the interest rate was 0%? No, not unless I thought that the price would increase fast enough for me to recoup what I overpaid. It's easy to see how this becomes a positive feedback loop:
1) Cash becomes available to otherwise unqualified buyers.
2) Increase in demand drives up the equilibrium price.
3) The steady rise in prices makes it appear "safe" to lend out more high-risk loans. In fact, if you assume that you'll always be bailed out by steadily increasing prices, the higher the risk, the better.
4) Goto 1.
This loop becomes even more insidious when you consider the fact that a home is not just an investment. People want to buy homes as part of their normal life cycle, so seeing runaway pricing also leads to defensive buying on the assumption that they need to take out a huge loan and buy now rather than be priced out of the market forever. I can't tell you how many people I had to argue with on this point when they were pushing me to make that "great investment" just before prices started to collapse.
* The way people phrase this sort of thing is interesting to me. The idea is that falling house prices are always bad and rising house prices are always good. The problem I see with that is that housing is a necessity of life, so when you see house prices rising, you're also seeing inflation in the cost of living. Sure, people who own homes are doing OK, but on average, are we better off? Americans would think I was nuts if I was celebrating a sharp rise in the cost of oil simply because holders of oil futures were doing great. I can't quite stomach the idea that housing is really so different.
And just to be clear, the agreement will further state that often times a property seller will pay for the buyer agent's compensation from funds at closing, but that if this is not the case, that the buyer will be responsible for paying his agent.
This is an interesting legal and accounting sleight of hand, but it has been pointed out elsewhere that it is really just that. The reality is that these ancillary costs are always split between the buyer and the seller by being rolled up into the price of the home. There's really no way around that. Who writes the check is really just a formality.
Your point about financing later in your post is really the only reason this fiction is actually meaningful. I suspect that the "seller pays the fees" construct is really only useful to the agent, as it allows the agent to charge a higher fee because the agent's price gets rolled into the price of the house and the buyer gets to finance his portion of it rather than having to come up with cash up front.
So, yes, I assert that an agent would probably not be acting in his client's best interest by showing your property. Not unless the buyer specifically mentioned that he wanted to see properties where the seller wasn't willing to compensate his agent for bringing a willing and able buyer.
In order to represent his client's interests properly, the buyer's agent would simply add his price to the expected price of the house and other fees and see if it's comparable to other properties listed on different terms. As a buyer, all I really care about is how much comes out of my pocket at the end of the transaction. Whether I pay $1 to the seller and everything else goes to the agent, the government, or gets torched in a big bonfire doesn't matter to me. An analysis based on whether the agent's fee is laundered through the seller first is just not helpful.
Do you think "Cozy 5br 2.5 bath on 0.5 acre lot" with a few pictures adequately describes a house?
No, not at all. The question is where the value added for a real estate agent is, and I'm suggesting that depending on how specific what you're looking for is, being able to figure out which 5br 2.5 bath house to look at is not it. There is a difference between offering a special insight into a particular set of listings (which the agent will no doubt have if he or she is active) and acting as a gatekeeper to those listings.
My mother was an executive recruiter for many years, and it's obvious that her (hefty) fee didn't come from being able to search through resume databases. Her value added wasn't in going through 100,000 resumes and getting it down to 50. it was going through the 50 and narrowing it down to 1 or 2 and then guiding the process through interviews and hiring.
The recruiting industry suffered from problems similar to the real estate industry--a bunch of privileged databases that spawned an industry of people who thought that they deserved a paycheck because they had access to them. Now that those databases are more open, the value added has moved elsewhere and the average quality of the agent has had to increase. The only losers were the people who had no value to add in the process. My point is simply that I see advertising and moving information as one of the least valuable services that the real estate industry provides in the modern world, and fighting to continue to control the information channels is not good for anybody but the get-rich-quick hacks who are dragging the whole industry down.
Sadly, the real estate industry appears to me to suffer from a nasty case of adverse selection, as it's flooded with people who have few skills and limited scruples who are only enabled right now by their access to the professional network. Competing those people out of existence and establishing a couple of tiers of service is probably a good thing. Just want listings? Go with those guys. Need the whole package? I'm here and you know you can trust me because all the hacks were competed out of the business by the listings bots.
Let me make another point about that: getting an offer quickly is crucial.
It's crucial, but I think it's that way more for your second reason than your first. Having two mortgages is a show stopper in this day and age. The fact that prices go down the longer an asset is listed for sale is more or less a fundamental economic reality in any market, whether people are reading anything into the listing time or not. It's price discovery.
If the commission offered by the seller's agent is too low, a lot of buyer's agents may just decide to not show the property to their buyers. I don't fault them for doing that.
I don't fault them for being rational actors in that situation, but isn't this an obvious case of the way the system works causing an inherent conflict of interest? The fact that it works this way and hasn't been corrected is an obvious black mark on the reputation of the real estate professional. Anything that gives the buyer's agent an incentive to select properties based on anything except what's in the best interests of the buyer is an inherently broken system.
For example, when a house first goes on the market, there is an Open House held just for agents and brokers. Top level agents listing high-end homes will often pay a caterer hundreds of dollars for this open house, just to draw in as much attention from other agents and brokers as possible.
I'm sure that a good real estate agent brings plenty of value to the transaction, but what you're describing sounds like one of the strangest, most antiquated ways of doing business that I could possibly come up with in the 21st century. Honestly, it makes the real estate industry sound like the travel agents that don't have jobs anymore because all they did was act as gatekeepers to information that we all take for granted today.
A real estate transaction is a complicated process, but if the main claim a real estate agent has on his or her commission is the fact that he or she plays an expensive game of telephone to propagate easily indexable and searchable information, then I suspect that a lot of them are going to have to find new jobs in the next few years while the industry restructures itself to do something more useful.
Inflated market today? Man..where are you living? Housing values are dropping like crazy in most of the US....and it is slowly starting to sink in to homeowners minds that their homes aren't worth what they think or want them to be worth. I"m looking to buy in the near future myself...it is definitely a buyers market.
Well, they're dropping like a rock because prices have been inflating like crazy over the past several years. Personally, I don't see any reason to believe that we're seeing the bottom of it now based on incomes, historical norms, credit availability, etc. I suppose it all depends on your neighborhood, but the numbers were far out of line with historical norms.
I guess it depends on what the negotiated price would have been in the absence of the agents.
Well, the agents likely affect the price beyond their fees, so let's assume that they drop their fees from $X to $0. In that case, the price would be lower by some fraction of $X, depending on on the relative price sensitivities of the buyer and seller.
Of course it also depends on how hot the market is - having multiple offers for every property is very different than having a house sit on the market for months or being forced to sell due to financial problems, etc.
This is the real key. The question of which party pockets what fraction of the savings (or eats what fraction of the cost) is a question of relative elasticities. This is a fairly straightforward result from the type of analysis done in the theory of tax incidence. The bottom line is that one party paying the fee is simply not true.
This may seem like unimportant nit picking, but I think it's an important issue to consider because claims like this one are usually masking an uglier reality. Most people simply repeat the "party X pays" claim because they don't know any better or because it's convenient, but you can bet that the reason the claim originated was to mask the fact that somebody is taking a huge chunk of cash off the top of a transaction. It's much easier to get people to go along with a large fee by saying, "Don't worry, the other guy pays." That's why the government will tell you that your employer pays half of your social security tax when the reality is that you're on the hook for almost all of it, or why people are slobbering over a "gas tax holiday" when the reality is that they'll barely see any of the savings.
Well the idea is the buyer agent commission is supposed to be an incentive to show the home. When I listed my home my agent told me, ok we can offer the other agent 3% or 4%, 4% is more expensive but will encourage more buyer agents to show off your home.
Well, that certainly sounds above-the-board with no inherent conflict of interest.
You are splitting hairs, the seller gets cash minus X% commission.
No, this is really an important sleight of hand by anybody who wants to hide the actual incidence of a fee or tax imposed by a third party. The party who "pays" the commission (or tax, or anything else) is divided based on the relative price sensitivities of the buyer and seller.
This is no different from the idea that your employer "pays half" of your social security contributions. The reality is that if the social security tax went away, the amount of money you take home will likely increase by more than your current contribution to SS. Just as your employer would never give you a salary offer without taking into account "their" portion of the tax, no home seller would ever list an asking price without taking the agent's fee into account.
I tend to assume that transactions where those sorts of price-hiding shenanigans are used are usually those in which the party who is "not" paying the fee or tax is the one getting screwed.
If you want a printer with just a driver and no extra crap, try looking at business printers.
Seconded. Or at least look at a low end laser printer. Anything but a consumer grade inkjet printer. There's a simple rule I try to impress upon everybody I know who is shopping for a printer. Cheap inkjet printers are designed to do one thing and one thing only: Turn full ink cartridges into empty ones. Any printing done in the process is entirely coincidental.
Having ventured into the creepy world of computer graphics drivers (in embedded land), I've found that there's often another issue at work as well. A lot of graphics vendors (at least, a lot of the smaller ones) cross license stuff left and right, so at the end of the day, it's hard to figure out who owns what and who has the right to distribute what data sheets. If A licenses something from company B to make a chip, A often doesn't want to give you the data sheet for fear of raising the ire of B. They tell you to go to B for the details. When you call B, they tell you, "That's A's chip. We don't know anything about it," or, "I'm sorry, we don't entirely own the technology there. We can't tell you who we licensed our part from." The same mess holds true with wireless Ethernet chips.
I'm starting to think that some of the semiconductor industries are becoming so secretive that every time they put out a new product, they're going to start killing all their engineers and hiring a new "clean" batch for the next rev. It's amazing to me how hard it is for even a partner who buys the chips and integrates them has a hard time finding meaningful specs on some things.
No, I don't usually goto websites for self promoted unbiased information.
No, that would be stupid. What would be smart, though, would be using their web site to get a list of the cases they've been involved in and reading the specific arguments they've made.
No, I mean the standard thousand feet whihc was at state in the last case they took up and won where a person won't have to move away from a school if they bought the property before getting caught for the offense that makes them a sexual offender.
There are a lot of cases, so I don't know which one you're referring to or the specific legal arguments that were being made. The one I was referring to was the fatally-flawed (and still active, as far as I know) Iowa law. The distance was 2000 feet, it included places other than schools, made no distinction between actual dangerous child molesters and teenagers who showed poor judgment about who to have sex with, and never expired. Draw a ~1-mile diameter circle around every school, day care center, and in-home child care facility and tell the 40-year-old who had sex with a 15-year-old when he was 19 that he and his family can't live anywhere within those circles and you'll see the problem. These laws are typically shot down (or challenged) because of the bad things they do, not because of the good things they're meant to do.
The filters weren't unaccountable. They were specifically in place for porn and have the ability to make exceptions for legitimate websites in which might have been confused and blocked with porn. If your actually knew anything about what was being purposed, you wouldn't be coming off with that high and mighty attitude.
Again, if you want to debate the specifics, you'll have to be specific. I can't be sure that I know anything about the specific case that you're not citing. I'm simply stating the general arguments that have been made. The reality is that the ACLU comes down on the same side as the ALA (and, as far as I can see, the Supreme Court) on this one.
I didn't say the ACLU hates America.
No, you just said that catching terrorists was "against their agenda." Forgive me for misrepresenting your fair-minded representation of their position.
Lets take the domestic spying for instance. ACLU member has said that the only reason they are attempting to sue the telecoms is to collect information about teh Evil Bush Administration.
Is this an, "I heard it from an ACLU member in a bar" sort of thing?
Cases like Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, which said he was in the right...
What?? Nobody won that one on all issues, but the government's position was ruled against on some significant points, the most important being that they don't have (as they asserted) the power to hold a US citizen indefinitely without some sort of judicial review. Probably most telling is the fact that Scalia's dissent from that ruling wasn't to claim that they did have that power, but to go further and say that it's not allowed absent an official suspension of habeas corpus. That's hardly a case of the government being vindicated. In fact, if the case hadn't been brought, the government would probably still be asserting the power to disappear its own citizens. Although the ACLU only filed an amicus curiae brief in that one, cases like it justify the ACLU's existence even if all it does normally is cause trouble.
...then there is United States v. Butenko in 1974 that backed previous court rulings that said judicial review wasn't needed for tap in which the primary purpose was to gather foreign inteligence.
That's absolutely true, but the court was unclear on how that data could be used or a clear distinction between foreign intelligence and law enforcement. As is true with your other citations, the question at
I really don't see how that is relevant to my general opinion that liberals don't defend their viewpoints. Obviously, what little attempt is made is in the academic sphere.
I'm just noting that most people I know managed to be exposed to a fairly wide variety of well-considered viewpoints in college and you seem to have missed out on that.
While my company blocks that site, the url indicates it's about an abortion protest. They do exist, but the scope and scale of the 2004 national convention protests far exceeds anything that ever has happened with an anti-abortion protest. Firstly, you have the entire issue of protesting the political convention of a party. This strikes at the very heart of our political system, and reaks of riots between political factions in the late Roman Republic. It is one thing to protest specific political issues, it is quite another to protest an entire political party engaging in what should be a sacred exercise of our party system.
I think you're missing a very important point here: The protest was as large as it was because we're mired in an ill-conceived war. Compare that to any disturbances of the 2000 RNC and you'll find that the big factor was not generalized blind hatred but an actual issue, just like the abortion issue. That issue just happens to be one of the most important issues that a government can face. I was less surprised about the backlash against our Republican-led foreign policy than I was about the surprising lack of backlash against the Democratic Party's part in it. In short, painting one as an issue protest and another as blind lashing out is simply nonsense.
Some conservatives think abortion is wrong, and attack THAT ONE ISSUE. Some may even attack, literally, those who are performing abortions. What they don't do is go up to every person with an Obama button and say "You're an evil baby killer!". Do you see the difference? You've actually supported my argument.
Since you weren't able to access the link, I'll summarize the specifics of the protest: It was a bunch of obnoxious nutbags bum-rushing a showing of Horton Hears a Who. I'll leave it to you to explain the relevance of the target audience of small children and Disney aficionados. Alternately, we might also agree that sampling the reasonableness of mainstream political beliefs from protesters is not likely to yield accurate results.
I'm not a Rush fan, but the guy has an AM radio program. He had a television show that aired at 2 in the morning for a few years in the 1990s. He is hardly a significant figure.
Please name 3 other people who you consider minor figures who have a weekly listenership of between 12 and 22 million (depending on sources) and at least one book that spent a half a year on the NY Times bestseller list.
I'm talking about the hollywood stars, the endless movies with political themes, not to mention the major media outlets (with the exception of fox news of course). Lets not forget the great stalwarts of liberal media like the New York Times and kin, which fortunately are failing at a record pace.
I know, I know. Liberal media. Massive conspiracy of news organizations to spin the news.
Liberal politics infect the entirety of entertainment. I have to listen to rock starts saying "fuck Bush", hollywood stars pushing the next greatest political indoctrination film (ie Children of Men), the regular news pushing the latest destined to fail social program of the month, the list is seriously endless.
Yes, I'm sure that Children of Men (and, perhaps, Horton Hears a Who!) is a major threat to our political discourse, just as Chuck Norris and Pat Boone are. Why do I get the strange feeling that mainstream conservatives would be less than thrilled to take ownership of Ted Nugent's behavior?
Somehow I don't see them doing much of that lately.
Have you tried the press section of their web site? They're usually pretty busy. The filtered version from WND is probably not as helpful.
They are more apt to be making sure the government has a hard time prosecuting child molesters...
Yep. Due process. It's not just for a few of us any more.
...and making sure that registered sex offenders can live close to school yard...
If by "close to" you mean "a distance so long that it amounts to banishment" I suppose you have a point. Pass a ridiculous law and expect to get it challenged. That's life.
...making porn freely available to school children by their opposition to filters in libraries...
Filters with little or no accountability about what information they censor with a long history of restricting access to a lot of non-pornographic information. Frankly, if a library is having trouble keeping kids from surfing porn on a public terminal in view of everybody, they have some problems that need to be addressed. Don't make it sound like the ACLU simply answered the question, "Should the government give kids free porn" with a resounding "Hellz yeah!"
...and attempting to crack down on the government for anything it does that seems to be against their political ideology like catching terrorists.
Oh, come on. That's over the top, even for the typical anti-ACLU crap. Why does the ACLU hate America? Waaaa! You're smarter than that. Shame on you.
Due process is not just for you and me. It's also for other people. The fact that people who fight for due process will always find themselves working on behalf of people who commit crimes is not a strike against them. It would be like me claiming that the QA department in my company hates our software because they keep finding bugs and rejecting it, and that their real agenda is to see us not make any money.
The question is, how willing are you to bend the rules just because the accused is accused of something you don't like? Do we lower the burden proportionally with the severity of the crime, or do we do our best to treat everybody according to the rule of law? Is due process only unimportant when somebody else's liberties are on the chopping block?
Perhaps I need to over look all the vile and less then honorable stuff they have accomplished so I can see them in a better light like you do.
Perhaps so, or perhaps it would be better to think about what the actual reasons and goals for their actions are. If railroading one particular criminal is more important to you than the broader protections and liberties that our justice system affords us, then I suppose you won't find much common ground with them. If, like me, you admire somebody's ability to stand up for what's right and important, even when it's unpopular or where violating the rule of law might give us some short term satisfaction, then you might be impressed.
Liberals can certainly defend their positions with legitimate arguments, but generally don't.
And you went to a "major university"? Do they give refunds?
I'm not basing this on the internet per se, although that is highly relevant in this day and age. My opinions are based on the 2004 Republican National Convention protests. The nuts handing out political fliers all over the city.
Well, it's a good thing that conservatives never do crazy stuff like that.
Propaganda produced by the likes of Michael Moore.
I'm going to guess that you majored in something technical and didn't spend much time in classes that discuss public policy. Getting the flavor of academic political analysis based on fliers and student club activities doesn't count.
Last but not lease - I've personally had to deal with liberals accuse me of a wide variety of bad things. I've been told I hate the poor despite the fact I'm not particularly wealthy. I've been told I hate minorities, despite the fact I'm hispanic.
For what it's worth, I believe that I've been accused of being anti-American, even though I am an American. I've also been accused of wanting "the terrorists" to win, even though I go to work every day and specifically work on projects designed to help catch them, which is more than most of the population is doing.
I've been told I hate gays, despite the fact I'm friends with a few prominent gay men.
You mean that people were--gasp!--making a rude and unfair assumption about you based on the actions of extremist elements whose political positions you happen to sometimes share? Say it ain't so! What kind of jackass would do that? Then again, does it bother you that the party you support has done such a good job of cynically exploiting anti-gay sentiment with their "protect marriage" propaganda?
I've never in my life heard a conservative in real life say anything like that to a liberal.
Well, you're presumably out of college, so I'm guessing you're old enough to have spent some time in bars. I just don't know what to say to that except to applaud your choice in bars.
I've never met a conservative teacher...
What "major" university did you say this was, again?
...nor seen conservatives take to the streets as a show of force...
No, I suppose that when conservatives do it, it's called protesting and not "taking to the streets as a show of force."
As I said, I live in NYC and grew up in a very liberal neighborhood (Park Slope).
Yes, your posts reek of the sophistication of one well-versed in crazy liberal political discourse. Far be it from me to challenge your credentials.
I've heard it all.
I suspect that you either haven't "heard it all" or you simply weren't listening. You seem to be comparing the insane wing of one side to the thoughtful mainstream of the other. That doesn't fly.
The idea that conservatives are uniformly some sort of analytical would-be philosopher kings and liberals are all a bunch of screaming lunatics is the hallmark of somebody who simply hasn't been paying attention to the real discussions. A quick run through the comments at dailykos.com doesn't give you a real picture of the debates or the players any more than reading some of the batshit insane rants at townhall.com or worldnetdaily.com. If that's what you were getting from your friends in Park Slope, let me be the first to suggest that you should have surrounded yourself with smarter friends.
Frankly, the narrative of "We legitimately think they're wrong and they just think that we're evil" falls into its own trap of painting a complex set of positions and a wide variety of people as a black and white melodrama. If you honestly haven't heard anybody defend a liberal political position with legitimate arguments instead of anti-conservative rants, I think that you'd be getting ahead of yourself in applying for a job as a thoughtful and well-traveled political commentator. Don't quit your day job.
My point is that mandating that gays be allowed to marry would be the same as forcing American Christians to convert to Islam. YOu're pissing off one group of people to appease another.
I see what you're saying, but the way I see it, it's more like telling the Muslim theocrats that they should ignore the fact that other people are living their lives differently than they might. You're not forcing anybody to do anything.
To continue down the road of broken analogies, let's say you're reading a book, and some guy on the other side of the country wants to use the force of government to prevent you from reading books. He's imposing his will on you in that case. It could legitimately be said that you're imposing your will on him by not submitting to his will, but the two complaints are hardly symmetrical.
By mandating that gays be allowed to marry, you are forcing the anti-gay group to accept homosexual marriage. By NOT allowing gay marriage, you are forcing homosexuals to accept that they are not allowed to marry.
That's absolutely true, and I resent the idea that we're "stepping on toes" in any legitimate sense any more than interracial couples are "stepping on the toes" of the local Klan chapter. Yes, in the most literal sense, they are. The local Klan members are going to have to live with the unbearable burden of knowing that somebody did something icky that doesn't affect them in any measurable way. But back in reality where we have to make fair-minded policy decisions, we have to move beyond the idea that any time two parties disagree, neither one has a legitimate case and we might as well choose randomly.
Are you suggesting that we should force the majority to accept your views simply because YOU think they're right?
I'm not saying exactly that. I don't want to force anybody to accept my views. I want to prevent people from enshrining their views into law unless there's a legitimate state interest, and I want to see any laws that were passed without such an interest repealed. I haven't seen any evidence of a victim or a legitimate state interest in preventing homosexual couples from marrying, so while I respect peoples' right to want to kick gays around, I don't see any reason for them to be allowed to use the government to do so. Are you suggesting that, for example, Loving v. Virginia was wrongly decided?
The idea of "majority rule no matter how much it tramples the rights of the minority" simply doesn't work. There's a reason the US Constitution was written with an eye toward preventing a 51% majority from running roughshod over the 49% minority. As they say, "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what to have for lunch."
What's the correct answer? As far as I'm concerned, the government either needs to start doling out marriage contracts fairly or it needs to get out of the marriage business entirely. If there's no way a government could possibly use a power equitably, then giving it that power will cause only heartache.
It should be (and currently IS) up to the people to decide.
How far do you push the idea of unchecked majority rule? State run religion? Anti-miscegenation laws? Confiscation of all of the property of an ethnic minority? Concentration camps? I'm having visions of a protester with a sign in front of some sort of death camp being met with, "But, maybe that's just, like, your opinion, man!"
Interesting timing for this conversation, given that Mildred Loving died a few days ago.
You obviously don't like their right to disagree, and I can understand that, but what you need to understand is that the rest of the planet does not share your views. Change something and you are going to be stepping on somebody's toes.
Frankly, I don't see how that's "stepping on somebody's toes" any more than American Christians are "stepping on the toes" of Muslim theocrats in the Middle East (to raise a favorite bogey man of a crowd who also tends to be vociferously anti-gay marriage) by not converting to Islam. Sure, I suppose that technically something that they're doing is pissing them off for no justifiable reason, but that's about a far as it goes. It should be pretty obvious to an uninterested observer who is in the wrong.
How about all the young Barry Goldwater Republicans? Plenty of them around now in their 50s.
I, for one, would be *delighted* if they actually started taking office and changing things instead of talking about how the Republicans that they are electing into office aren't "real" Republicans like they used to be. When you start longing for the good old days, it's a pretty good sign that you think the good old days are over. Likewise, when we start fondly remembering when the the Republicans stood for small government and fiscal responsibility, it's a strong indicator that that's not what the Republican party is any more. More power to somebody who tries to change it from within, but they need to acknowledge that at this point in history, they are the ones who aren't "real" Republicans anymore.
I'm not so quick to buy into the sudden disowning of the insane policies of the past several years by the same people who voted for them and cheered for them until they fell apart. For a while, it was looking like the word "conservative" meant, "somebody the Republican pundits approve of" rather than standing for any recognizable ideology. George Bush was a great conservative hero until his policies went south, and now he's a "fake" conservative without changing a single position.
If the Republican party can actually turn itself into the organism that it likes to remember itself as, I might well be convinced to get behind it. Until then, I see this whole, "I'm a real conservative and the people who actually run things aren't" as just a convenient way of distancing themselves from the disastrous policy decisions that they made nary a peep about when they were being enacted.
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Oh, I'm certainly not arguing that having a real estate agent in the loop is without value. A house transaction is about as complicated a transaction as the average person will enter into, so having an expert who has your back is quite valuable given the money involved. As I said in another post, I think that competition from third parties who do nothing more than provide listings will probably help good Realtors over the long run. It will compete the do-nothings right out of business and improve the signal to noise ratio for those who actually provide significant value beyond doing a quick database search.
There are a few ways of looking at this, and I don't know the overall answer, but this piece goes into it a bit. Commissions are down as a percentage of the sale price, but have they changed in real dollars? There are a few variables at work here, and I'm trying to figure out which ones would dominate which markets. An agent could afford a lower percentage fee with either a higher priced houses or by moving more houses with the same effort.
I have no reason to doubt that this is true, but I can't really get my head around why a bank would do a loan that way. It wouldn't make sense to give me a good rate if I put 20% down on a $300K loan for a home worth $100K home and then used the additional $200K to pay for other transactions. Why would they let me do it on a smaller scale? They're essentially loaning me an additional unsecured $200K at the same terms they used for the secured $100K portion. It's a surprising behavior for the types of financial organizations that charge you a fee for using the ink in their printers.
A few years ago, I would have simply assumed that there was some clever reason based on accounting or economic fundamentals that sophisticated bankers were aware of that I wasn't. These days, I'm more inclined to think that it's just another policy that's not especially clever. That being said, if you can pull it off as a borrower, why not?
No, we have shown that given the choice between overpaying $50K or overpaying $834K, I would chose to overpay $50K. That's a true and valid result, but it doesn't say much. What you're working around is what the total price is, not the base value. All else held equal, you as a consumer should be willing to pay the same amount out of pocket for a home at a low interest rate as you do at a high interest rate. The only difference would be what fraction of that total is principal and what fraction is interest.
That's where we disagree. All else held equal, what a person is willing to pay in "sticker price" should move relatively predictably with interest rates because the analysis for a rational actor is relatively straightforward. If it does not, that means there's a factor other than the interest rate. It could be preferences for homes. It could be the ability of the average home buyer to do the necessary calculation. It could be a change in the risk premium that people put on homes or conversely, the expectation of future prices. But there is another variable.
That's absolutely true.
But it is quantifiable assuming that home buyers in aggregate are rational actors acting on only the present discounted value of an investment. The reality is that the change in quantity observed does not match the change in quantity one would predict from a cold analysis of the numbers. That means some other variable is in play.
Let's take your $325K home example and assume 7% interest with no money down (for simplicity) over 30 years. Let's say that's the "correct" number for the current market. Let's flatten any assumptions about future interest rates, inflation, etc, and just do the straight up calculation. If you do that, what you're saying as a buyer is that the home is worth a pile of cash roughly $840K high. If we tweak the interest rate downward, the home is still worth that amount to you. You're just willing to pay a higher sale price for it. If the sale price adjusts to the point where suddenly the buyer is willing to pay $1M for it over 30 years, something has changed about your assumptions. This is the same type of calculation you'd do for a long term capital investment as a business or, as a lender, what you'd pay for a bond. It's all just some variation on a present discounted value calculation.
That's 100% correct. I'm not saying that the only speculation was on the part of the home buyers. By and large, the less sophisticated home buyers were just happy to get a home with payments they could afford. The lenders were clearly speculating, though. The only way such loans make sense is on the assumption that they'll almost certainly be paid back or that the loan would be backed by an asset that was increasing in price fast enough to cover some of the more exotic amortization schemes. You simply can't run the numbers on loans like that and get a result that makes sense without some pretty extreme assumptions about future home prices.
The answer wouldn't change.
Well, we could start by choosing a more reasonable comparison than 20% vs 0% and not assuming that the $1M home is only overvalued by ~5%. More to the point, given the option to spend $1M, is the most sensible thing to do with the money to buy an asset that's worth less than $1M with it? The fact that it compares favorably to an obviously suicidal financial decision isn't really all that impressive.
My point was not that lower interest rates don't justify some increase in home prices. My point is that the price increases we saw were not justified by the interest rate changes alone, and the price decreases we will see are likely to be more than those we'd expect from a simple shift in interest rates. An additional factor had to come into play. Barring a sudden change in the average American's preference for houses, the only rational explanation I can come up with is speculation. That is, the average buyer expected to see a higher growth rate on the value of a home than the average buyer from years ago did.
Not surprisingly those numbers agree with what I've been hearing from eager buyers over the past few years: "Buy now or be priced out forever!" "House prices only go up!" "They're not making land any more! Supply and demand!" Those claims didn't hold up to scrutiny then, and I'm not inclined to believe the shallow analysis of talking heads on TV who are calling today's prices a buying opportunity despite the fact that they're still well out of line with historical norms in most areas.
I agree with you that the idea that low interest rates alone drove rational buyers to bid up home prices is not tenable. My thought experiment: Would I buy a home for several times what I thought it was worth and make payments for the rest of my life if the interest rate was 0%? No, not unless I thought that the price would increase fast enough for me to recoup what I overpaid. It's easy to see how this becomes a positive feedback loop:
1) Cash becomes available to otherwise unqualified buyers.
2) Increase in demand drives up the equilibrium price.
3) The steady rise in prices makes it appear "safe" to lend out more high-risk loans. In fact, if you assume that you'll always be bailed out by steadily increasing prices, the higher the risk, the better.
4) Goto 1.
This loop becomes even more insidious when you consider the fact that a home is not just an investment. People want to buy homes as part of their normal life cycle, so seeing runaway pricing also leads to defensive buying on the assumption that they need to take out a huge loan and buy now rather than be priced out of the market forever. I can't tell you how many people I had to argue with on this point when they were pushing me to make that "great investment" just before prices started to collapse.
* The way people phrase this sort of thing is interesting to me. The idea is that falling house prices are always bad and rising house prices are always good. The problem I see with that is that housing is a necessity of life, so when you see house prices rising, you're also seeing inflation in the cost of living. Sure, people who own homes are doing OK, but on average, are we better off? Americans would think I was nuts if I was celebrating a sharp rise in the cost of oil simply because holders of oil futures were doing great. I can't quite stomach the idea that housing is really so different.
Your point about financing later in your post is really the only reason this fiction is actually meaningful. I suspect that the "seller pays the fees" construct is really only useful to the agent, as it allows the agent to charge a higher fee because the agent's price gets rolled into the price of the house and the buyer gets to finance his portion of it rather than having to come up with cash up front.
In order to represent his client's interests properly, the buyer's agent would simply add his price to the expected price of the house and other fees and see if it's comparable to other properties listed on different terms. As a buyer, all I really care about is how much comes out of my pocket at the end of the transaction. Whether I pay $1 to the seller and everything else goes to the agent, the government, or gets torched in a big bonfire doesn't matter to me. An analysis based on whether the agent's fee is laundered through the seller first is just not helpful.
My mother was an executive recruiter for many years, and it's obvious that her (hefty) fee didn't come from being able to search through resume databases. Her value added wasn't in going through 100,000 resumes and getting it down to 50. it was going through the 50 and narrowing it down to 1 or 2 and then guiding the process through interviews and hiring.
The recruiting industry suffered from problems similar to the real estate industry--a bunch of privileged databases that spawned an industry of people who thought that they deserved a paycheck because they had access to them. Now that those databases are more open, the value added has moved elsewhere and the average quality of the agent has had to increase. The only losers were the people who had no value to add in the process. My point is simply that I see advertising and moving information as one of the least valuable services that the real estate industry provides in the modern world, and fighting to continue to control the information channels is not good for anybody but the get-rich-quick hacks who are dragging the whole industry down.
Sadly, the real estate industry appears to me to suffer from a nasty case of adverse selection, as it's flooded with people who have few skills and limited scruples who are only enabled right now by their access to the professional network. Competing those people out of existence and establishing a couple of tiers of service is probably a good thing. Just want listings? Go with those guys. Need the whole package? I'm here and you know you can trust me because all the hacks were competed out of the business by the listings bots.
It's crucial, but I think it's that way more for your second reason than your first. Having two mortgages is a show stopper in this day and age. The fact that prices go down the longer an asset is listed for sale is more or less a fundamental economic reality in any market, whether people are reading anything into the listing time or not. It's price discovery.
A real estate transaction is a complicated process, but if the main claim a real estate agent has on his or her commission is the fact that he or she plays an expensive game of telephone to propagate easily indexable and searchable information, then I suspect that a lot of them are going to have to find new jobs in the next few years while the industry restructures itself to do something more useful.
This is the real key. The question of which party pockets what fraction of the savings (or eats what fraction of the cost) is a question of relative elasticities. This is a fairly straightforward result from the type of analysis done in the theory of tax incidence. The bottom line is that one party paying the fee is simply not true.
This may seem like unimportant nit picking, but I think it's an important issue to consider because claims like this one are usually masking an uglier reality. Most people simply repeat the "party X pays" claim because they don't know any better or because it's convenient, but you can bet that the reason the claim originated was to mask the fact that somebody is taking a huge chunk of cash off the top of a transaction. It's much easier to get people to go along with a large fee by saying, "Don't worry, the other guy pays." That's why the government will tell you that your employer pays half of your social security tax when the reality is that you're on the hook for almost all of it, or why people are slobbering over a "gas tax holiday" when the reality is that they'll barely see any of the savings.
This is no different from the idea that your employer "pays half" of your social security contributions. The reality is that if the social security tax went away, the amount of money you take home will likely increase by more than your current contribution to SS. Just as your employer would never give you a salary offer without taking into account "their" portion of the tax, no home seller would ever list an asking price without taking the agent's fee into account.
I tend to assume that transactions where those sorts of price-hiding shenanigans are used are usually those in which the party who is "not" paying the fee or tax is the one getting screwed.
Having ventured into the creepy world of computer graphics drivers (in embedded land), I've found that there's often another issue at work as well. A lot of graphics vendors (at least, a lot of the smaller ones) cross license stuff left and right, so at the end of the day, it's hard to figure out who owns what and who has the right to distribute what data sheets. If A licenses something from company B to make a chip, A often doesn't want to give you the data sheet for fear of raising the ire of B. They tell you to go to B for the details. When you call B, they tell you, "That's A's chip. We don't know anything about it," or, "I'm sorry, we don't entirely own the technology there. We can't tell you who we licensed our part from." The same mess holds true with wireless Ethernet chips.
I'm starting to think that some of the semiconductor industries are becoming so secretive that every time they put out a new product, they're going to start killing all their engineers and hiring a new "clean" batch for the next rev. It's amazing to me how hard it is for even a partner who buys the chips and integrates them has a hard time finding meaningful specs on some things.
No, that would be stupid. What would be smart, though, would be using their web site to get a list of the cases they've been involved in and reading the specific arguments they've made.
There are a lot of cases, so I don't know which one you're referring to or the specific legal arguments that were being made. The one I was referring to was the fatally-flawed (and still active, as far as I know) Iowa law. The distance was 2000 feet, it included places other than schools, made no distinction between actual dangerous child molesters and teenagers who showed poor judgment about who to have sex with, and never expired. Draw a ~1-mile diameter circle around every school, day care center, and in-home child care facility and tell the 40-year-old who had sex with a 15-year-old when he was 19 that he and his family can't live anywhere within those circles and you'll see the problem. These laws are typically shot down (or challenged) because of the bad things they do, not because of the good things they're meant to do.
Again, if you want to debate the specifics, you'll have to be specific. I can't be sure that I know anything about the specific case that you're not citing. I'm simply stating the general arguments that have been made. The reality is that the ACLU comes down on the same side as the ALA (and, as far as I can see, the Supreme Court) on this one.
No, you just said that catching terrorists was "against their agenda." Forgive me for misrepresenting your fair-minded representation of their position.
Is this an, "I heard it from an ACLU member in a bar" sort of thing?
What?? Nobody won that one on all issues, but the government's position was ruled against on some significant points, the most important being that they don't have (as they asserted) the power to hold a US citizen indefinitely without some sort of judicial review. Probably most telling is the fact that Scalia's dissent from that ruling wasn't to claim that they did have that power, but to go further and say that it's not allowed absent an official suspension of habeas corpus. That's hardly a case of the government being vindicated. In fact, if the case hadn't been brought, the government would probably still be asserting the power to disappear its own citizens. Although the ACLU only filed an amicus curiae brief in that one, cases like it justify the ACLU's existence even if all it does normally is cause trouble.
That's absolutely true, but the court was unclear on how that data could be used or a clear distinction between foreign intelligence and law enforcement. As is true with your other citations, the question at
I'm just noting that most people I know managed to be exposed to a fairly wide variety of well-considered viewpoints in college and you seem to have missed out on that.
I think you're missing a very important point here: The protest was as large as it was because we're mired in an ill-conceived war. Compare that to any disturbances of the 2000 RNC and you'll find that the big factor was not generalized blind hatred but an actual issue, just like the abortion issue. That issue just happens to be one of the most important issues that a government can face. I was less surprised about the backlash against our Republican-led foreign policy than I was about the surprising lack of backlash against the Democratic Party's part in it. In short, painting one as an issue protest and another as blind lashing out is simply nonsense.
Since you weren't able to access the link, I'll summarize the specifics of the protest: It was a bunch of obnoxious nutbags bum-rushing a showing of Horton Hears a Who. I'll leave it to you to explain the relevance of the target audience of small children and Disney aficionados. Alternately, we might also agree that sampling the reasonableness of mainstream political beliefs from protesters is not likely to yield accurate results.
Please name 3 other people who you consider minor figures who have a weekly listenership of between 12 and 22 million (depending on sources) and at least one book that spent a half a year on the NY Times bestseller list.
I know, I know. Liberal media. Massive conspiracy of news organizations to spin the news.
Yes, I'm sure that Children of Men (and, perhaps, Horton Hears a Who!) is a major threat to our political discourse, just as Chuck Norris and Pat Boone are. Why do I get the strange feeling that mainstream conservatives would be less than thrilled to take ownership of Ted Nugent's behavior?
Yep. Due process. It's not just for a few of us any more.
If by "close to" you mean "a distance so long that it amounts to banishment" I suppose you have a point. Pass a ridiculous law and expect to get it challenged. That's life.
Filters with little or no accountability about what information they censor with a long history of restricting access to a lot of non-pornographic information. Frankly, if a library is having trouble keeping kids from surfing porn on a public terminal in view of everybody, they have some problems that need to be addressed. Don't make it sound like the ACLU simply answered the question, "Should the government give kids free porn" with a resounding "Hellz yeah!"
Oh, come on. That's over the top, even for the typical anti-ACLU crap. Why does the ACLU hate America? Waaaa! You're smarter than that. Shame on you.
Due process is not just for you and me. It's also for other people. The fact that people who fight for due process will always find themselves working on behalf of people who commit crimes is not a strike against them. It would be like me claiming that the QA department in my company hates our software because they keep finding bugs and rejecting it, and that their real agenda is to see us not make any money.
The question is, how willing are you to bend the rules just because the accused is accused of something you don't like? Do we lower the burden proportionally with the severity of the crime, or do we do our best to treat everybody according to the rule of law? Is due process only unimportant when somebody else's liberties are on the chopping block?
Perhaps so, or perhaps it would be better to think about what the actual reasons and goals for their actions are. If railroading one particular criminal is more important to you than the broader protections and liberties that our justice system affords us, then I suppose you won't find much common ground with them. If, like me, you admire somebody's ability to stand up for what's right and important, even when it's unpopular or where violating the rule of law might give us some short term satisfaction, then you might be impressed.
And you went to a "major university"? Do they give refunds?
Well, it's a good thing that conservatives never do crazy stuff like that.
I applaud your even-handed assault on divisive political propaganda.
I'm going to guess that you majored in something technical and didn't spend much time in classes that discuss public policy. Getting the flavor of academic political analysis based on fliers and student club activities doesn't count.
Again, a landscape entirely dominated by liberals.
I can't imagine conservatives being so crass.
Ah, yes, vandalism. A tactic completely isolated to the left.
For what it's worth, I believe that I've been accused of being anti-American, even though I am an American. I've also been accused of wanting "the terrorists" to win, even though I go to work every day and specifically work on projects designed to help catch them, which is more than most of the population is doing.
You mean that people were--gasp!--making a rude and unfair assumption about you based on the actions of extremist elements whose political positions you happen to sometimes share? Say it ain't so! What kind of jackass would do that? Then again, does it bother you that the party you support has done such a good job of cynically exploiting anti-gay sentiment with their "protect marriage" propaganda?
Well, you're presumably out of college, so I'm guessing you're old enough to have spent some time in bars. I just don't know what to say to that except to applaud your choice in bars.
What "major" university did you say this was, again?
No, I suppose that when conservatives do it, it's called protesting and not "taking to the streets as a show of force."
Yes, your posts reek of the sophistication of one well-versed in crazy liberal political discourse. Far be it from me to challenge your credentials. I suspect that you either haven't "heard it all" or you simply weren't listening. You seem to be comparing the insane wing of one side to the thoughtful mainstream of the other. That doesn't fly.
The idea that conservatives are uniformly some sort of analytical would-be philosopher kings and liberals are all a bunch of screaming lunatics is the hallmark of somebody who simply hasn't been paying attention to the real discussions. A quick run through the comments at dailykos.com doesn't give you a real picture of the debates or the players any more than reading some of the batshit insane rants at townhall.com or worldnetdaily.com. If that's what you were getting from your friends in Park Slope, let me be the first to suggest that you should have surrounded yourself with smarter friends.
Frankly, the narrative of "We legitimately think they're wrong and they just think that we're evil" falls into its own trap of painting a complex set of positions and a wide variety of people as a black and white melodrama. If you honestly haven't heard anybody defend a liberal political position with legitimate arguments instead of anti-conservative rants, I think that you'd be getting ahead of yourself in applying for a job as a thoughtful and well-traveled political commentator. Don't quit your day job.
To continue down the road of broken analogies, let's say you're reading a book, and some guy on the other side of the country wants to use the force of government to prevent you from reading books. He's imposing his will on you in that case. It could legitimately be said that you're imposing your will on him by not submitting to his will, but the two complaints are hardly symmetrical.
That's absolutely true, and I resent the idea that we're "stepping on toes" in any legitimate sense any more than interracial couples are "stepping on the toes" of the local Klan chapter. Yes, in the most literal sense, they are. The local Klan members are going to have to live with the unbearable burden of knowing that somebody did something icky that doesn't affect them in any measurable way. But back in reality where we have to make fair-minded policy decisions, we have to move beyond the idea that any time two parties disagree, neither one has a legitimate case and we might as well choose randomly.
I'm not saying exactly that. I don't want to force anybody to accept my views. I want to prevent people from enshrining their views into law unless there's a legitimate state interest, and I want to see any laws that were passed without such an interest repealed. I haven't seen any evidence of a victim or a legitimate state interest in preventing homosexual couples from marrying, so while I respect peoples' right to want to kick gays around, I don't see any reason for them to be allowed to use the government to do so. Are you suggesting that, for example, Loving v. Virginia was wrongly decided?
The idea of "majority rule no matter how much it tramples the rights of the minority" simply doesn't work. There's a reason the US Constitution was written with an eye toward preventing a 51% majority from running roughshod over the 49% minority. As they say, "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what to have for lunch."
What's the correct answer? As far as I'm concerned, the government either needs to start doling out marriage contracts fairly or it needs to get out of the marriage business entirely. If there's no way a government could possibly use a power equitably, then giving it that power will cause only heartache.
How far do you push the idea of unchecked majority rule? State run religion? Anti-miscegenation laws? Confiscation of all of the property of an ethnic minority? Concentration camps? I'm having visions of a protester with a sign in front of some sort of death camp being met with, "But, maybe that's just, like, your opinion, man!"
Interesting timing for this conversation, given that Mildred Loving died a few days ago.
I'm not so quick to buy into the sudden disowning of the insane policies of the past several years by the same people who voted for them and cheered for them until they fell apart. For a while, it was looking like the word "conservative" meant, "somebody the Republican pundits approve of" rather than standing for any recognizable ideology. George Bush was a great conservative hero until his policies went south, and now he's a "fake" conservative without changing a single position.
If the Republican party can actually turn itself into the organism that it likes to remember itself as, I might well be convinced to get behind it. Until then, I see this whole, "I'm a real conservative and the people who actually run things aren't" as just a convenient way of distancing themselves from the disastrous policy decisions that they made nary a peep about when they were being enacted.