This is a textbook case for the Austrian business-cycle theory: Artificially low interest rates and loose money produce overinvestment, by both bankers and builders, in a bubble — this time, offices, apartment buildings, and retail space — that can’t be sustained once the artificial stimulation comes to an end, as it must. In this case, that malinvestment has to be worked out at two levels: At the financial level, among the lenders and borrowers, but also at the physical level: There’s going to be a lot of dark storefronts out there, with serious long-term consequences for nearby neighbors and for local real-estate markets: Foreclosures will put more property onto the market, driving down rents and subsequently making existing loans less tenable as the cashflow of commercial properties is diminished. They called the Depression-era tent cities “Hoovervilles.” The next time you see a mile of half-abandoned strip malls, think “Obamaville.”
This is just one of many things that could happen this year that will crater Obama’s reelection hopes.
…by the numbers. And yet we’re supposed to just go along with the “authorities,” and “settled science” when there is great political power and trillions of dollars at stake.
Mickey Kaus says that the Employee Rights Act doesn’t cut it:
The problem with Wagner Act unionism isn’t necessarily that unions aren’t democratic. It’s that they are granted a power–mainly the power to go on strike as the sole and exclusive bargaining agent of a firm’s workers without the strikers getting fired–that maybe they shouldn’t have. The UAW is a democratic union. That didn’t stop it from crippling the auto industry. The problem is that the wrong people voted in the UAW’s democratic elections–not the suppliers who would be hurt when UAW members decided democratically to win themselves inefficient work rules, not the mayors whose towns were decimated, not the taxpayers who had to bail them out (in part to save the suppliers and mayors), and certainly not the customers. Making even entrenched undemocratic unions more democratic might have the perverse effect of validating those unions’ exercise of their Wagner Act power. According to Barnes, Sen. Hatch “insists the ERA isn’t antiunion.” That’s not a feature. It’s a bug.
They are looking at different certification regime options.
– One option is to develop certification that works in parallel with the SAAs.
…
– Safety requirements have been posted (are “on the street”).
– So any participant will know what requirements they need to meet.
– Safety goals: What would firms do to feel comfortable flying their own people on the vehicles?
We need to have a metadiscussion about appropriate levels of safety. We can’t allow NASA’s irrational approach to contaminate the entire industry, or allow their “certification” to become a standard. Different people are going to have different risk/reward thresholds. I’m working on an Issue Analysis on this topic for CEI right now.
[BTW, the entire February space issue of Reason, from which that linked Zubrin piece on NASA’s irrational approach to safety comes, is now on line.]