Egoism
Individualism
Sovereignty
Splendor

(These ideas are explicated in this sloppy manifesto)

 
Robson's legacy...

My friend Richard Riccelli wrote to me about the better side of Land Contracts, and this is part of our conversation.

Me:

As a side project, in my copious spare time, I'm setting the type for a biography of Ed Robson, the entrepreneur behind Sun Lakes and a number of other 55+ resort-style master-planned communities. Sun Lakes is a good example of how a Land Contract can vastly improve the capital value of real estate. No bank would have lent on unimproved rural land for any purpose except farming, so Robson convinced the sellers to let him have it by lease-purchase (thus conserving all of his cash), then used the built lots to finance the buildable lots, with some of the proceeds going to amortize the land. The difference between slow and never, and Robson is worth half a billion dollars by now.

Richard:

I have long held divergent ideas about development and zoning and the effect of regulation - or attempted regulation - on real estate. But isn't it interesting that no matter how regulators wish to corral development and impose outside interests, creative and determined people like Robson find ways. Imagine if these folks were unfettered and admired instead of feared and fought.

Indeed. The land Robson built on was vastly neglected. In fact, he got a few breaks from regulators because no one else had any interest in doing anything with that land. But if you drive east from Sun Lakes into the Gila River Indian Reservation, you can see some of the extent of Robson's legacy. In the reservation, the land is dead flat nothing for miles in every direction. Not beautiful mountainous desert, just desert, the kind that kills unprepared wanderers every day. Sun Lakes is rolling hills, man-made lakes, golf courses, clean-lined stores and churches and compact, elegant homes, a model suburb.

My client for this and many other projects is Thomas Horton & Daughters, publisher of Robson's biography and of a vast number of free-market Economics texts. Tom Horton lives in Sun Lakes, so I've been driving there for twelve years, watching as Robson's influence spread north and west from Sun Lakes, watching as the whole southern corridor of Maricopa County was transformed from scraggly desert and struggling agriculture to very beautiful, very prosperous suburbs. All of this is Ed Robson's legacy.
posted by Greg Swann at 9:00 AM

 
Deswindling real estate

I happen to be selling a house for an executive of The Goldwater Institute. This is a particular thrill for me, but it's entirely an accident: He was referred by a lender I use all the time, and my being a libertarian didn't--and shouldn't--enter into our negotiations. Nor do I target-market libertarian think tanks, although this might not be such a bad idea.

Anyway, away from our transaction, he wants to talk about how state interference inhibits real estate ownership, and this is a topic near and dear to my heart. Probably I'll post some of my work product as we do it. But there are a couple of other faces to the die that might not be as interesting to him, even though they are fascinating to me.

For example, various mannequins of the welfare state are always running around insisting that some segment of the economy needs "help" to purchase homes. Schoolteachers and firefighters are often the designated victims, as if people well above the median in income are at some awful disadvantage. But it is the programs devised for the poor that are the most pernicious.

AmeriDream is one, but there are plenty of others, along with the old reliable 103% FHA home loan. It's possible that the people actually benefitted by these programs exceed those who are hurt, but I'd bet against it. Homeownership is the end consequence of habituated industry and thrift, and people who have not mastered these habits do not maintain nor long retain their homes. They are offered the promise of homeownership, but this is not a promise that can be delivered from the outside.

So--cui bono?--who benefits? Politicians, functionaries and busy-bodies, of course. But also sleazy Realtors, who get paid for selling homes to unqualified buyers, then get paid again when the by-now-usually-wrecked homes are repossessed and re-sold by HUD.

Here's another choice bit, this from the song Choctaw Bingo, by James McMurtry:

Uncle Slayton's got his Texan pride
Back in the thickets with his Asian bride
He's cut that corner pasture into acre lots
He sells 'em owner financed
Strictly to them that's got no kind of credit
'Cause he knows they're slackers
When they miss that payment
Then he takes it back

This is called a Land Contract or a Contract for Sale. Unlike a Mortgage or a Deed of Trust, the buyer has zero equity in the real estate until he retires the very last dollar of principal debt. This was the type of arrangement behind the Whitewater swindle. I hasten to add that this is completely legal. McMurtry does us the favor of showing us how viciously immoral it can be, but a great many huge real estate investments were financed this way.

The difference--the entire difference--is in the seller's estimate of the buyer's credit worthiness. In both types of scams, the key qualification of the buyer is that he is not qualified. There's really nothing to be done about Contracts for Sale. People can freely contract to any purpose. But I think an Ethical Egoist should be averse to either of these two types of real estate chicanery.
posted by Greg Swann at 4:49 PM

 
In league with the Greeks...

Richard Nikoley passes along the link to this wonderful speech by Bruce S. Thornton about the vast legacy left us by Ancient Greece. Here is the peroration, the art of which we owe to the great Hellenic rhetors:

The legacy of the Greeks under assault today thus deserves defense and celebration for the simple reason that much of what we are is the result of that brilliant examination of human life first begun by the Greeks: as Jacob Burckhardt says, "We see with the eyes of the Greeks and use their phrases when we speak." We must listen to the Greeks not because they will give us answers, but because they first identified the questions and problems, and they knew too where the answers must come from: the minds of free human beings who have control over their own lives. And this, finally, is the greatest good we have received from the Greeks: the gift of freedom.

posted by Greg Swann at 1:09 PM

 
Splendor can wait...

Email from Billy Beck, whom I have known for around ten years, and whom I have publicly accused of acting like a nine-year-old girl:

> From: Billy Beck
> Date: Tue, 8 Mar 2005 16:19:51 -0500
> To: Greg Swann
> Subject: Now Hear This

> I haven't the remotest interest in a goddamned thing that
> you have to say.

> Don't ever appear in my e-mail again. I'm telling you and
> you'd better pay attention.

This is not the first time Billy has thrown me out of the universe, but that actually sounds more like nonagenarian than nine-year-old. I leave it to you to list all the things it doesn't sound like.
posted by Greg Swann at 2:27 PM

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