It’s finally happening. Some of us, who have been writing about the US housing bubble for several years now, underestimated how long it would last. But as Ben Jones has exhaustively documented at his excellent Housing Bubble 2 Blog, bubble cities around the country are all starting to see the following trends:

Hardly a surprise to many of us here, but always refreshing to hear official mea culpas, however implied the tone. This from a BIS report on world housing finance:

[Libertarian Analysis 1, no. 1. (Winter 1970): 14–28]

Libertarians tend to fall into two opposing errors on the American past: the familiar “Golden Age” view of the right-wing that everything was blissful in America until some moment of precipitous decline (often dated 1933); and the deeply pessimistic minority view that rejects the American past root and branch, spurning all American institutions and virtually all of its thinkers except such late nineteenth-century individualist anarchists as Benjamin R. Tucker and Lysander Spooner.

This interesting news clip (BBC?) draws attention to the newest trend in traffic regulation: eliminating all signs and even clear distinctions between roads and sidewalks. The point is to address the perverse incentives associated with imposed “safety”: the safer we believe we are as drivers and pedestrians, the more recklessly we behave.

Take a look at this article, which (briefly) describes the arrest of a Korean minister who was implicated in a black market organ transplant ring. According to the story, this clergyman and his cohorts were taking “premiums from terminally ill patients in return for arranging tours to China for transplant surgeries.” How dare anyone actually find organs for desperately ill patients! What was the compensation to the conspirators? Again, according to the article,

Here is my preface to the newly published Polish edition of Democracy--The God that Failed.

In human history, for better or worse decisive turns in the course of events occur. The most recent of such turns was in 1989 with the implosion of communism all across central and eastern Europe. This had been predicted seventy years before by the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), a native of the Polish city of Lemberg (Lwow).

Edward Chancellor, author of a very expensive report on the credit bubble, and the classic Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation presented a talk last summer to the Global Borrowers and Investors Forum on The Destabilizing Stability of the Greenspan Era.

In “Trial and Error: The scientific system does little to prevent scientific fraud. Is there a better way?” , New York Times Magazine, January 15, 2006, author David Dobbs, in the wake of the Hwang Woo Suk cloning fraud, says: