Now is the time at Ed Driscoll.com when we juxtapose videos!
At the Wall Street Journal, “Ghost Estates Haunt Irish Landscape:”
And from last year, China’s ghost towns:
(Concept H/T: SDA.)
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Much of the US and world housing crisis comes from the confusion in government that objects have a value in themselves roughly equal to the labor used to construct them. Barney Frank and friends thought that it didn’t matter if houses were built for people who could not pay for them. Houses were objects of value. How could one have too many of them? Production was valuable in itself. Barney Frank and his friends believe a Marxian theory of value: it takes much labor to build a house, so it must be valuable, no matter what.
Here is a story about Russian planned production in the 1970′s. Russian furniture production was of course state-run, and they carefully measured production in tons shipped. The factories met their quotas by building large, heavy furniture. This didn’t work out well in a country with tiny, walk-up apartments.
A commenter at CafeHayek wrote: Over 20 years ago, while in grad school, I had an Econ Professor who while visiting the Soviet Unioin, saw a nail plant manager being awarded the Order of Lenin, due to his high nail production. The plant manager achieved his goal by manufacturing thousand pound nails!
There are a million ways to go wrong. Only a free market of self-interested, independent agents is going to find the few ways of doing things right.
People will bend the rules to extract a profit from a government which is intent on breaking the laws of economics. No amount of regulation will fix this. Unlike private enterprise, producing useful products and services is not a requirement in the game of serving the government.
im super sick of the battery on my phone going down so fast, it annoys the poo out of me, see what happens, find a good site and BAM my battery is dead, so yeah, i luckily had enough battery to read this and post the comment haha, i have no life. yay me!