Periodically, all bureaucracies go through periods in which they try to “improve”. This process demands “self-examination” and “misson-examination” and “finding out what we’re here to do and doing it better”.
Such “improvements” involve vast, complicated lies that avoid real questions such as “Do this agency really need to exist?” and “How did people manage to get along without us for thousands of years?”
In fact, bureaucracies exist to provide high-paying jobs for people whom automation and foreign (slave and near-slave) labor have left few other high-paying employment opportunities.
So, each bureaucracy has, as an unspoken mission statement: “We must both justify our existence and demonstrate our clear need for more funding.” All such funding involves transferring money (easily counted units of human energy) from their neighbors to themselves.
The needs of their neighbors are always the same. Each of us, and each of our neighbors, knows that our greatest economic need is for more money. So, bureaucracies exist and grow by convincing those with the power to transfer accumulations of human energy (money, paychecks, savings) from others to themselves.
In many countries, this is done at the point of a gun. In more “civilized” societies, voters are pretended to have the “power” to make changes.
The only “changes” are that different bureaucracies will have greater access to funding.
II A new Bureaucracy to “improve fairness in real estate”.
Bureaucracies in the pseudo-democracies need lots of problems to “solve”. They have an ongoing need to find as many “unfairly treated people” as possible. Then, they just have to “help”.
Banks, with very complicated mortgage procedures that involved endless “bundling” and re-selling, drained so much money out of the real estate system that they, first, pumped up the apparent value of homes by allowing unqualified buyers to make purchases beyond their means. Then, as the amount of money they took from borrowers and gave to themselves became more obvious, the value of homes dropped, often below the value of the mortgage.
Homes, for several years, appeared to have been “rising” in value. Much of that “added value” disappeared in the last couple of years. A few (3%?) of homeowners are in default, mostly because of their own speculative purchases.
So, presidential candidates are promising to “help”. That assures only that the problem will get worse. But, a new bureaucracy is on its way. The Department of Homeowner Security will make sure that everything is done “fairly” and provide “equal access to the American dream.”
Those unions dependent upon taxing real estate for their members’ salaries will welcome this “bold step forward”. They will not let themselves see that the increased property taxes they, themselves, have levied by obedient school boards are a major cause of the “sub-prime crisis”.
