Here are two more things, in a very long list, that I do not understand.

 The dog bites the kid from next door or the news reader on TV and the excuses, on behalf of the dog, begin to flow from the dog apologists. The kid was running or the anchor got too close. No one suggests that the owner had failed to train his or her dog properly. A dog should never bite a human unless it is being beaten with a stick or reacting to a command of the owner, like in a police capture. Period. Never. If the dog bites anyone it should be put down or the owner should be subject to a training regimen and testing of the dog upon completion. Then permanent restrictions on where the dog can be taken and under what leashing restrictions should be put in place. By the way, I have owned two dogs and many cats over the years so I do not simply hate animals.

A hunter mistakes a lady hanging her wash in her back yard, or walking her dog in the park, for a deer and shoots her. Again, the lack of training seems clear. But the excuses fly again. The poor hunter was so upset! Who might not have done the same thing! Bullshit. The hunting license should be revoked automatically and immediately along with the gun permit and criminal charges should be brought. This guy shot somebody and as a society we have a responsibility to react to that. It may have been simple carelessness but we do not allow this in any other area of social interaction. Why here?

Part 3, Pseudo-science.

 I’m sure civilization has been dealing with pseudo-science since alchemy. This latest round I believe may have started in the 70’s and 80’s with the hysteria about nuclear power. Perhaps even earlier with DDT. Remember The Silent Spring. Clearly people were using DDT incorrectly and over too much ground. But even today, when we know how much DDT would help African nations where children are dying of malaria, we can’t seem to get over it and produce some for limited usage.

As for nuclear power we need to build small plants of all the exact design like the French. And we need to send the spent fuel rods to the salt mine facility in Nevada. No solution to our energy problems is perfect.

Which brings me to the current hysteria about wind turbines on Cape Cod. Pseudo-science is everywhere in this debate. The vegetable oil lubricant in the turbines is hazardous. Every sensible study says no, not true. People within a mile of the turbine can’t sleep because of the noise and the “flicker” gives them seizures. Sound tests in the complainant’s homes indicate the sound can’t even be heard. And on and on.

A manufacturing business in an isolated area of the Cape wants to build a wind turbine to ease some of the burden of its electric costs. Those costs are higher on the Cape than anywhere else in Massachusetts for reasons no one can decipher. Businesses regularly leave the area looking for lower energy prices. This manufacturing company gets the necessary approvals since no one lives nearby. But a woman whose house sits a mile away, she is not even an abutter, sues stating that the tower will ruin her view. Here the housing investment hysteria and the pseudo-science hysteria meet. The business is told to forget about it unless they can prevail in court. The lady involved seeks out others and they launch a group committed to stopping all wind turbines in the area. They find a professor with no credentials or training in this subject who says all the pseudo-science claims are true. They stop wind turbines in Bourne and at the local community college. They shut one down, already built for millions of dollars in Falmouth, because one old neighbor claims it makes him crazy. It’s at the sewage treatment plant. This fellow lives near the sewage treatment plant and he’s worried about the value of his property.

The big wind turbine development on Nantucket Sound has been held up by one appeal or another for 15 years. When one claim of the opponents, they will kill birds for example, is shown to be untrue by proper studies they shift to another.

We have reached a point in this country where anything that changes the status quo is opposed for hysterical and unproven reasons. Whether the proposal is for soccer fields, a public library, a wind turbine or a new house, someone sues to stop it.

The country cannot succeed in addressing the many, mutual concerns of the future if we continue to allow a small minority to stop all progress. Other countries have moved years ahead of us in health care, energy independence, manufacturing, infrastructure development as we have consistently allowed projects to be stymied by lunatics.

Could we build the interstate highway system today? Will we ever move forward?

How hysteria killed America

Part 2, Financial Advisers

In the months leading up to my retirement in 2009 I studied six or seven books by so-called financial advisers regarding what I must have in the way of income and capital to comfortably retire.

The major assumptions seemed slightly askew but I concluded just because they didn’t apply to me that doesn’t mean they weren’t right for lots of other folks. The assumptions were that you would owe a big mortgage on your house as well as sizable loans on your several luxury automobiles. You would be used to traveling widely throughout the world and staying in luxurious accommodations. One book mentioned that spring trip to the vineyards of France that you take every year along with the Mediterranean cruises in the fall. Don’t want to give that up.

In addition, of course, you entertained lavishly and often throughout your life. How dreary would retirement be without the ability to spoil your friends and family members.

All of the books had an odd hysterical tone to them. You needed millions and millions of dollars to even consider retirement and even then you would have to live like a poor hermit. There was even the suggestion that if you planned to draw down your capital in retirement you would be cheating your heirs out of their rightful inheritance.

It all sounded a bit like Gloria Vanderbilt’s old suggestion that you could never be too rich or too skinny. Certainly, it sounded like you could never be rich enough to retire.

When I thought about it, however, I realized that these very same people writing these books make their fortunes based on exactly how large your fortune is and that reducing these piles of money only cut into their profit. From their own self interested perspective, you could never have enough.

By the way, all the authors were of the opinion that you were more likely than not to live practically forever. A happy thought, but somehow they managed to turn even that idea dark. So the chances of living so long you would run completely out of dough just as you needed it most hung over all the discussions. Best bet: keep working and keep investing and trading with me.

At the same time, many financial advisers decided to proclaim their lack of respect for Social Security. It is a bankrupt big government scam, a Ponzi Scheme. The SS trust fund is running out of money. No one can actually live on this amount anyway. Think of all the money you would have made if you had given the same amount to us to invest for you! Think of the commissions we would have made! We don't hear as much about this as we did before the collapse of the stock market. But the idea will not go away completely since there is money to be made.

By the way, Social Security is working perfectly and has plenty of money. It was never set up to operate from trust funds. It was to pay out to beneficiaries as funds came in from wage earners. The trust fund developed because so little was paid out in the early decades and so much was coming in. When an increase in the Social Security payroll tax is needed in the future,  it should be enacted. It will not be the end of the world for young workers. Social Security works and the older folks in our country have never been better off than they are at this moment.

But I still hear some people say, I’ll have to work until I die, according to my financial advisor.

How hysteria killed America

Did it all begin with the un-Holy Trinity of Real Estate agents, Financial Advisers and pseudo-science consultants?

Part 1, Banks and Real Estate

A house was no longer a home, a place to live and eventually own, it had become a real estate investment. Real Estate agents insisted that a family or an individual should be able to live there and make money at the same time through the unlimited appreciation in the value of the house. In fact, you should probably sell that “investment” every year and take out the profit so you can buy a bigger, more “profitable” place. Guess who also benefited from all this movement in real estate?

People who bought houses grew to expect big payoffs and soon hysteria was rampant in the real estate market. People bought houses and condos and sold them weeks later at a profit. No one actually lived in these places, at least not for long. Few people thought this was odd or that it might not continue forever. People who bought houses and stayed in them were chastised by their smarter friends for not turning a profit.

People who had been kept from homeownership by the prejudicial practices of the banks got regulatory relief at the same time mortgage sales became a matter of commissions and not the prevue of a salaried bank loan officer. The hysteria, to make commissions and peddle mortgages from back alleys, took off and again no one seemed to notice the danger. People who clearly could not continue to pay a certain monthly bill were assured that they could so the mortgage broker would make a commission and disappear. Others were sold mortgages at one price only to learn that bill would increase beyond their reach shortly. No one cared.

When this buying and selling for an instant profit stopped being possible and houses went back to being places you paid for to shelter you and your family from the elements, real estate people declared it a “collapse” because housing prices were no longer expanding exponentially. As the price of houses returned to a less hysterical level, the banks promptly blamed big government for that adjustment, certainly not their practices, or the wild over building and demanded that everyone be saved by the taxpayers. The home owners who were sold a bill of goods could just go to hell as far as they were concerned. After all, those home owners took a risk, which they were assured wasn’t a risk at all, and they lost. The realtors and their banks were too big to lose anything.

Next, hysterical people were told that they must immediately abandon their homes if some appraiser declared the property to be worth less than they had paid for it. Why? At the time they bought it they thought the price was fine. If they continue to live there and pay for it, might it not someday in the future be worth what they paid for it? Even if the value never makes it all the way back to what they paid for it, what about deducting the cost of living in the place all those years? Isn’t shelter worth something? But that’s different than an investment. My car was worth less than I paid for it the moment I drove it off the dealer’s lot but I didn’t stop making the payments.

Of course, folks who had to sell and move for other reasons were screwed. They had to take a loss and move on or abandon the property.