The problem that HB-1506 addresses originated in 1995 when Wall Street banks took upon themselves the authority to replace the existing public land title recordation system with its 300+ years of successful history, with a member’s only private system. This system called the Mortgage Electronic Registration System (MERS) gutted the public property records and left millions of homes with questionable titles. This was done without any government approval and against the recommendations of the title industry and the county recorders. MERS has been found by 10 state supreme courts to be acting illegally and is currently being sued by CA, NV, TN and 14 other states. The Federal Reserve, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), regulator of the national banks and the FDIC are investigating MERS for questionable business practices and for the systemic risk it poses to the nation’s financial system. The CEO resigned last week. Speculation in Washington has the OCC taking over MERS and nationalizing our land records, a clear violation of states’ rights.

Nations often default on foreign debt, but this is debt the government owes the Japanese people. Will Japan embark on a huge austerity program in the midst of deflation? Will Japan simply print the money? If so, what happens to interest rates? Should those interest rates rise to a mere 3% or so, interest on Japan’s national debt will consume most of its revenue. This mess shows the foolishness of using Keynesian and Monetarist stimulus to defeat deflation. Neither worked. Now Japan is left with an enormous debt problem and no way to solve it.

Most analysts, money managers, and broker-dealers are perpetually bullish because they have a vested interest to be perpetually bullish. Just as real estate salesman do not sell houses if they tell potential clients houses are too expensive, broker-dealers don’t make commissions if people are not buying. Moreover, most money managers earn no fees at all if their clients sit in cash.

In FRL credit-based fiat systems, credit expands until the system blows up. History proves it, and no regulation has ever stopped it.

You could say that requiring Americans to remove pretty much all of the light bulbs now in use and replace them with bulbs that people don’t want is the ultimate in nanny statism, except that nannies don’t generally poison the children in their care. If Americans understood what the Democrats were trying to do when they passed this legislation in 2007, the result would be mass outrage. Legislation has been introduced to repeal the impending ban on incandescent lights. Contact your Congressman and Senators, and tell them to vote for repeal.

The most important way in which growth has been mis-measured by GDP is that it fails to capture the increase in leisure (including much better quality and quantity of life after 65) as well as the more pleasant work environments that many people enjoy.

I’ve never really understood the objections to “me-too” drugs. Somehow, the topic of health care makes otherwise sensible people forget everything they ever knew about economics and start spouting Victorian-era Socialist rhetoric about wasteful competition and superfluous duplication. These same people would think you were crazy if you started ranting about how many societal resources are wasted by having three kinds of unsalted butter available in the supermarket. And yet, this is the same argument.