Links: 2010-02-28 – CRE meltdown in DC, emigration from Ireland and more
The last feature on the list of links below is on CRE in Washington D.C. where the economy is fairly robust. If you know anything about these properties, you would agree these are not poor properties at all. The problem with them is not location or property maintenance; it’s the debt. The properties were leveraged beyond reason and now their cash flows are falling short.
The Denver Post piece about continuing high levels of unemployment brings to mind the fact that as of today, something over a million on unemployment compensation face the end of benefits and quite possibly starvation. Yet measures aimed at extending benefits typically meet with the withering criticism of Tea Party brownshirts, virtually all libertarians to a man, obsessed about the deficit, and the presumed intrinsic “evil” of the state. This latter notion, every bit as peculiar as it is absurd, resides at the very heart of Ron Paul libertarianism and is one that makes the phenonmenon of the Tea Parties a rather mixed blessing. It is one thing to observe the moral corruption so easily discerned in the political vermin holding themselves out as “public servants” and quite another to conclude that the state enjoys moral agency. As anyone with even a passing acquaintenance with moral theology knows, only human persons possess moral agency. Additionally, this centrality of state “evil” in the libertarian catechism can only be considered a contradiction when measured against other of its tenets, say, the right to bear arms, a position often justified by pointing to the perpetrators of gun violence and not to the guns themselves as the locus of evil in these cases. Guns don’t cause crimes, we’re told, criminals do. Yet if guns are not to be accorded moral agency, how then is the state? In its rush to offer a rationale to justify its often sociopathic vision of individual ‘liberty”, libertarianism’s vision of state “evil” is simply a jumble of contradictions. How sad it is that starving children will likely suffer the consequences of the ideological blindnesses of these idiots.