mushinnoshin

According to Google Maps, I’m now 1.5 miles closer to work. But that’s not the best part — the best part is I jumped to the other side of two school zones. Rock.

Well folks, it’s my last post from here at Woodbridge. This computer is the last thing remaining in the apartment, having left it up since they won’t be connecting me at the house until Thursday.

It was an exhausting weekend, but we managed to get everything else moved over. I was even finally reunited with my piano, inherited from my grandmother who got me banging on it when I was a wee lad. The poor thing has been through hell in the meantime (even surviving a house fire) and needs some heavy duty restoration inside and out, but at least it’s finally reached home.

In addition to Comcast, Thursday will bring new carpet for the bedroom, and tommorrow night I’ll need to finish up painting in there. So then Thursday night I can start unpacking in earnest & getting things back to normal. Meanwhile I’m camped out in my den, having spent the last two nights there with my mattress laid out on the floor. Good times.

I’m going to have to link to The Onion’s take on this — not because it’s especially funny, but because I just can’t take this seriously as news.

I mean c’mon people, ‘changing of the rhetoric’ is news now? Have we really gotten so swept up in the newspeak that we’ll allow these goons to talk about changing the talk, and we’ll pretend that this means — anything? How ’bout changing, ya know, the actual policies that are killing people by the thousands?

Interesting op-ed on house flipping & rehabbing up at mises.org. I don’t have any major beef with the general thrust of the piece, but I’ve got a few quibbles:

Several years ago, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) passed a rule penalizing property owners who resell the properties within a short period of time, citing concerns about property flipping. (The penalty is a restriction on obtaining mortgage insurance from the Federal Housing Administration.)

Umm, well, shouldn’t a ‘free marketeer’ be steering clear of HUD & FHA programs to start with? And if we are going to have such programs, isn’t it wise to design the programs with safeguards that prevent or discourage their use in unintended manner? If I’m to have no qualms about entrepreneurs ‘flipping’ houses, I’m going to have to at least insist that my taxes not subsidize the financing they use.

…certain types of real estate investing might violate laws like the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act. [4] This law (Texas Business and Commerce Code Section 17.45) prohibits “an act or practice which, to a person’s detriment: (A) takes advantage of the lack of knowledge, ability, experience, or capacity of a person to a grossly unfair degree, or (B) results in a gross disparity between the value received and the consideration paid….”
[...]
Since all transactions involve unequal knowledge (and opinion) between buyer and seller, who is to say what is “unfair”? This leaves all transactions open to potential cancellation by the state…

Here again I find perhaps some mild stretching of the definition of free market. If the law states that the party in question should be arrested, fined, or otherwise punished — ok, yes, that might raise some flags (clearly it would be OK to punish true fraud, but the article correctly complains of the ambiguity in the law which could affect above-board situations as well).

But if the concern is just having transactions “open to potential cancellation by the state”? Well, when two parties make a contract, they expect that contract to be enforced by someone — the state. It is not really an encroachment on the free market for that state to specify in advance the conditions under which it will do so.

In the process of buying, fixing up, and reselling properties, real estate investors tend to leave neighborhoods much improved. This is urban renewal free-market style, in which property is paid for at a price voluntarily agreed to by the seller, not condemned or designated as “blighted” by the city and seized.

On this I agree, insofar as we’re discussing flippers & rehabbers. But I think a side mention needs to be made about a different sort of real estate investor, the land speculator. For land speculators the reverse is true: their interest lies in holding the property as cheaply as possible, for what may be extended times.

For example, if I had the money, and if I was a scumbag, right now I’d be buying up anything I could get my hands on in the area between SoBro and the Fairgrounds. Here’s an area of blighted residential slums and industrial wasteland less than 3 miles from the downtown core, with urban renewal squeezing in from three sides, talk of 8th & Lafayette as a possible convention center site, and the prospect of redeveloping the Greer location once the Sounds move. In other words here’s a place where you’d want to buy blighted properties on the cheap, sink as few dimes as possible holding on to them, to flip ‘em later on the land value alone.

In such cases it’s actually in your interest to let the housing devalue further. The less valuable the structures on the land, the less you pay in property taxes. It’s actually in your interest to rent the houses out to crackheads — people who will do your dilapidation work for you and would never dare complain to the authorities. Sure they won’t pay the rent every month, but as long as you get more than you would for a parking lot, you’re OK with it. And when the parking lot becomes more valuable, you’re OK to go that route as well.

Of course my long-term solution to this is a full fledged geolibertarian rent-sharing cooperative. But though that’s not going to happen anytime soon, we can do a lot to mitigate the problem in current realpolitik just by making a revenue neutral shift from traditional property tax to a Land Value Tax, moving all taxes off of the improvements and onto the land — simultaneously encouraging efficient development and discouraging speculation, sprawl, and deliberate blight. This is already in use and working well in cities around the world, including parts of Pennsylvania and Australia.

So ya see I’d been stalking the MLS listings for over a year… watching & waiting, lurking in the shadows, ready to pounce… Well finally it all came together, and as of this past Tuesday, I have joined the ranks of the deeply mortgaged, as the happy new owner of this little beauty:

The universe really came together on this one for me… after all that searching, after looking at thousands of listings — here it is, almost exactly what I had in mind, at my budget almost down to the penny, and the listing shows up during the very last week I had before the deadline to give notice to my landlord. I see the listing just before bed on a Sunday night, and I’ve got an offer in by Monday afternoon.

I wanted to stay in South Nashville, for a few reasons. Cartographically the location is unbeatable — largely because I work in Franklin, and the “reverse commute” is priceless (20-25 minutes in rush hour), plus I’m very convenient to the yoga studio (12 South) and the Tibetan Buddhist center (Berry Hill). Downtown is less than 10 minutes up Nolensville Pk, and Hillsboro/Vandy is 15 minutes down Wedgewood. My most remote regular haunt is the dojo in Antioch, but even that’s just a short jaunt east on 24. And in any case, I’m a stones throw from 440 and near entry points to all three interstates, which puts me 30 minutes away from damn near everywhere.

I looked all around the South Nashville area — 12 South, Berry Hill, Waycross / Fairgrounds, SoBro — all the way south down past Old Hickory Blvd to the Bradford Hills area. But the best intersection of price + neighborhood kept pointing me to pretty much exactly where I’ve been, in one of the neighborhoods that make up the area known as Flat Rock. I do love the area — not only do I get to immerse myself in a cornucopia of world cultures, but it’s one of the scant few places left in Nashville where one can still pick up historic housing without dropping a quarter mil or more. I just could not abide the “brick trailer parks” they were building from the 60s through the 80s. And though I’m not too elite for one of the micro-McMansions they started building in the 90s, I wasn’t prepared to go to Smyrna for one I could afford.

One complication — this area having never had the money found west of Franklin Pike, a good percentage of the old houses here are frame and/or siding houses. I really wanted to hold out for something brick — or even better, stone. A second complication — I’m not particularly inclined towards home improvement handiness. If we were all forced to define ourselves by sit-com archetypes, I’m sure I’d be a whole lot closer to Niles and Frasier than to Tim the Tool Man. I can do some things, but it will be slow and I’ll hate it. So it needed to be something at least well maintained, if not already renovated.

So when the listings showed me a beautifully maintained stone house, built in 1938, right in the heart of the old section of Woodbine proper, which got a new roof, A/C, hardwoods, plumbing, and wiring about 6 years ago?

Well I say it’s time for me to move!

So, yeah. I closed last week. I spent the weekend painting the bedroom, which I’ll also get recarpeted this week, then I’m moving in this weekend. I’ll have more painting & minor work to do once I’m in, but it shouldn’t be too much, the interior really is in pretty good shape. I’m sure I’ll keep y’all posted.

With all the talk lately about libertarian Democrats, it’s interesting to see CATO giving props to Bredesen — they gave him a 60, which is apparently a ‘B’ and puts him in a tie for third place.

Having spent an embarrassing number of years slinging discs myself, doing everything from the mega-corporate gig (Musicland) to the regional family chain (Peaches — something like Florida’s equivalent to Turtles or Cats) to the underground indie hotspot (Uncle Sam’s — something like a combination of Grimeys and Karma, plus body piercing & a headshop) — you’d think I’d have a lot to say about the closing of Tower Records.

Somehow I don’t. I do feel bad for the people that worked there, a few of whom are my friends. But otherwise — eh. Corporate chain bites the dust. A *better* corporate chain than many, to be sure. But for all the talk about their magnificent selection, I still never found anything I was looking for there.

Stores like Tower filled a need that no longer exists. The masses looking for the latest hits don’t need a massive deep catalog big box. Niche customers — like, say, indie rock hipsters — need a niche store — like, say, Grimey’s. And meanwhile the internet gives us deep catalog ‘long tail’ customers a deeper catalog than any store ever could.

And this is without even *thinking* about the mp3-only movement.

What we need are large amounts of porn, drugs, and libertarian philosphy [...] flooded into traditionally strict Muslim neighborhoods. I have a deep and abiding faith in the ability of our culture to corrupt _anybody_ if applied with enough persistance. One copy of “Debbie does Dallas” will do more to eliminate threats to the West than ten guns.
– Johnny Lemuria

Indeed!

(From a post on the Salon Liberty Yahoo group. Always an extremely fascinating read for philosophical & political scholars of a left-libertarian bent, populated by some of the most incredible minds of the movement.)

So last night it was movie time again, this time it was Aaron Russo’s America: Freedom to Fascism.

To begin with, let me acknowledge that I supported Russo in his bid for the 2004 LP Presidential nomination, and I met him briefly at the convention that year (as it turns out, his doctor and I have the same name). I say this only to set up that I really did want to like the movie more than I did, and I hate not being able to give it a great review.

First, the good: Russo does a decent job of pointing out some of the ways in which this country is barrelling towards fascism, which he uses (in accordance with the quote which is possibly misattributed to Mussolini) to mean a corporate police state. Further he does a good job of explaining the role that the Federal Reserve has played in this process, and the consequential role that banking plays as the puppetmaster behind the politicians.

But, the bad:

First, as I feared he would, he spends way too much time on the Income Tax, and specifically the anti-tax arguments made by the We The People activists. Now I’m not going to speculate on the accuracy or efficacy of their argument (which is essentially that there is no law on the books that requires citizens to file a tax return). I oppose (personal) income tax as a matter of principle, and as such, I believe that by advancing legal loopholes, even if correct, activists undermine the greater issue by suggesting that if the law were different, the tax would be acceptable.

I’m not saying he shouldn’t mention the income tax and its role in the march towards fascism, nor am I saying he shouldn’t mention the legal-loophole movements (I’ve seen I think basically three variants on those ideas, though the WTP version seems to be the most plausible and has the best foothold). Just saying he shouldn’t spend half the movie talking about it. If he wanted to make a movie about the tax movement, so be it, but in a movie supposedly about this country’s general trend towards a police state, the issue was greatly out of proportion. Give it 15 minutes, and release 45 back to talking about the Patriot Act, warrantless wiretapping, the death of habeas corpus, etc etc etc… some of which do get time, but not proportionally enough, and most of it long after the income tax talk has already shut our heads down.

Second is just a complaint about the film as cinema. I’m generally a fan of the current trend towards “docuvist” filmmaking, à la Michael Moore, Robert Greenwald, etc. I have no illusions that these films are unbiased, and it’s not a stretch sometimes even to call them docu-ganda, but I think so long as you go in knowing the film’s biases, they can be a great way to engage the masses in the war of ideas, and can entertain and inspire the hardcore at the same time.

Well, this film tries to catch that star, but falls sadly short, partly because of the mind numbing hour on the income tax, but moreso just because it never quite summons up the punch necessary to escape the realm of the traditional, dry, academic documentary. And when the film does try to utilize the more dramatic & humorous devices that Moore & company have mastered, it comes off contrived and seems to be trying-too-hard. It all has sort of that same sad-and-creepy vibe you get from seeing a parent trying to use the slang of their children.

Sooo — I dunno. I love to see libertarians striking out into this front of the culture war, and I’m glad to see Russo putting his all into the cause. And I suppose, for a first attempt, it ain’t bad. It’s certainly better than anything the right has done. But to catch up with the left, it’s gotta get better, and quick.

It seems that brilliant sci-fi humorist, philosopher, and fellow anarcho-conspiritorial nutjob Robert Anton Wilson is on his deathbed and struggling to pay his bills. Go here for more & how to help.