Sixteen Volts

Two Blowhards recently linked to Dean Baker and his blog "Beat The Press". The name sounds vaguely familiar, but I don't remember reading at least the posts in the front page before. In this front page alone, we can notice the posts "NPR Doesn't Believe in Markets", "NYT Discovers "Ghetto Tax"", "Housing Appraisals: The Accounting Scandal of the Housing Bubble". These all remound me of other things that I had heard lately. I especially chucked at the observation about "lawyer shortage" that currently prevents Dean from hiring a lawyer for $20/hour, even though he would really like to be able to do this. Clearly, something has to be done!

While I was reading Baker's posts about the housing bubble and its deflation in the near future, I thought of something that I was recently told back from the old country, namely that a 1100 sq. ft. townhouse costs these days about 200,000 euros even in the somewhat small and remote town of Kuopio. I don't even want to think what this would mean about the housing prices for Helsinki. It's almost like these people didn't learn anything from the previous bubble. Lots of people are going to get hurt this time. Around here the situation is nowhere as crazy, but even so, I can remember Toronto Star a few days ago lamenting the fact that the condo boom in the city is cooling down with all this construction going on, and the prices may also come down in near future. I wish somebody explained me why housing prices going down is supposed to be a bad thing, when everything else getting cheaper always seems to be worth cheering.

People in the boonies and stix naturally get to pay a lot less for their housing, but to compensate for this, they can only envy the glamorous lifestyle that us big city sophisticates get to have, as showcased in the famous documentary series "Sex and the City". Over there with the hicks, it's probably like in that old joke with the punchline "Three... if you bring your wife." The post "Los Angeles: The Glamorous Life" at "Citizen of the Month" humorously describes us the fancy life of the blog proprietor.

Another post titled "Blogs Across America" at the same site reminds us of the famous feelgood media event when millions of Americans formed a continuous chain that stretched from one coast to the other. I remember reading news about this when I was a kid, and even then I suspected that there just must have been a gap or two somewhere along the line. The Wikipedia page "Hands Across America" confirms these suspicions. Of course, I also immediately wondered what would have happened if somebody had connected one end of this human chain to a high-voltage electric wire. Would the person on the other hand have felt the jolt? Now that would be a good question for some college physics exam or Microsoft job interview.

"Ace of Spades" has a post "George Harrison To Release Pornographic Comic Book Featuring Icons From Young Girls' Literature" about the upcoming Alan Moore graphic novel "Lost Girls" that features the beloved fictional girl heroines Alice, Wendy and Dorothy having lots of sex. Since Moore is a well-known leftist, I am interested to see how the leftists on this side of the Atlantic will react to this. With their usual double standard pulling double time, I'd bet. God, how I wish that the "sophisticated" American leftists at least once actually met with their European counterparts who they so admire in the abstract. It would be such an eye-opening experience for both sides.

For some reason, this bold and transgressive artistic experiment also reminds me of Panu's observation that the exact same picture or series of pictures can be either oppressive patriarchal porn or enlightened liberating art, solely depending on who took it and what some matriarch and de facto leader of the feminist movement declares it to be. I guess that this is what Tommi likes to call "corpoism". By the way, the grinding sound that you might hear in the background is Andrea Dworkin spinning in her grave.

Then again, as the educational movie "Perversion for Profit" linked by Catallarchy explains to us, once a person is perverted, it is near impossible for him to go back to normal attitudes. As amusing as this Simpsonesque movie is for the modern viewers in our pornified era, it makes one really excellent observation that is so damn good that I wish I had come up with it: why is it that the blind people so rarely want to join the nudist colonies? After all, the blind should be just as encumbered and uncomfortable by having to wear clothes as everyone else, right?

Catallarchy also links to the post "Hating America" by "The Musty Man" which, despite the name, is an excellent rant against romantic anti-modernity and love of primitivism, not against anti-Americanism that one can see so often these days. I wonder that when we'll fly to Las Vegas in a week, will I be acting the same way as the backpackers act in this essay, so that I'll avoid the restaurants that we have here in Canada and only eat in those that we don't have up here. Hey, you gotta be authentic when you are among the natives and respect and observe their customs, as strange as they may seem to you!

Speaking of the strange customs of Americans, a while ago I saw an ad on some American TV channel about a debit card that you can get for a one-time payment of about ten bucks even if you can't open an ordinary bank account. I was puzzled about this: why would some bank turn down a person and not let him open a basic chequing account? You need to have a fixed address to open a chequing account, yes, but this was also required for the debit card in the ad, so that can't be the reason. The ad also said that there is no credit check, so that can't be the reason either. Perhaps some reader who knows more about this could enlighten me about this mystery.

Meanwhile, the essay "Do Rent-to-Own Stores Hurt the Poor?" by Thomas Woods at the Miser Institute (hey, I can't be the first person ever to make that obvious pun) examines the thorny issue of stores that sell stuff for the poor for inflated prices to cover the massively higher risk of nonpayments, defaulting and repossession costs. Then again, I can't really say that I disagree with his analysis here. We have one of these stores in the nearby Ethnictown area, and I thought that it was quite funny that somebody would pay $20 a week (that is, over a grand a year) to rent a 32" television set, as was advertised in the window. Lack of that infamous "future time orientation", I guess.

Look, the bottom line at least for me is simply this: if selling furniture and electronics to poor people really were a lucrative business that made obscenely large profits, you'd think that the ordinary furniture and electronic stores would have entered this business a long time ago. Their refusal to do so certainly tells me a story. But hey, if you really believe that these rent-to-own stores are immoral for effectively charging astronomical interest rates from the poor, very well, my answer is the same as it has always been for other social problems that are isomorphic with this one in the sense that they expect the low-risk customers to financially subsidize the high-risk ones: you open up a chain of furniture and electronics stores that sells its wares on credit to anyone who walks in, no questions asked, with a interest rate low enough so that you consider it to be "moral". Then we'll sit back and after a year or two come take a look whether your chain is profitable.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Friday, August 04, 2006 at 10:50 AM