Ben Bernanke is vindicated.

On the pages of WSJ, no less.

I have been one of the biggest supporters of Bernanke (here, here and here) in terms of both the remedies he used in the aftermath of the crisis and, as an extention, being long stocks for the last 3-4 years. Inflation is non-existent, QE helped asset prices rise and keep yields low, banks are flush with cash. Bernanke is becoming a legend.

Now, many say that he can’t dispose of those assets purchased without doing damage to the economy and driving the inflation up. But why is he’s receiving so little credit? Do they just expect him to dump the entire porfolio on the market in the matter of days? And secondly, if it drives inflation up a bit – it will only indicate a growing economy, or in simpler terms, more money chasing fewer goods – a scenario that we all should welcome. Wild-eyed inflation hawks, of course, envision Zimbabwe-like scenario where we push wheelbarrows of cash going grocery shopping. My only answer to them is: put your money where you fear is. Put the freaking inflationary position, like PIMCO did many times, and show us all how it’s done! Make some money on  your sentiment.

Inflation of Labor

Republicans now are rediscovering the “middle class”. Rubio made sure to make “middle class” the focus of his SOTU reply. It’s a welcome about face in a party that just a few months ago was celebrating business owners (as opposed to people who work for them) on Labor Day. It wasn’t surprising: the current Republican dogma coalesced around the idea that only business owners work hard; everyone else is either lazy or not entrepreneurial enough. In Republican mind, whoever didn’t become business owner or “made payroll” is implicitly a lesser member of society, a leech and a moocher.

Republicans love to keep their focus on inflation: there was no shortage of dire warnings coming from the right quarters about inflation that was just around the corner. The inflation that they had in mind never materialized, but in the meantime the other type of inflation – labor inflation has been devastating the communities for decades but received little attention of the doomsayers.

Back in the day, the time that many conservatives are nostalgic about, the 1950-60s, it was possible for a man with a high-school diploma to work at a factory and get paid enough to provide a middle-class lifestyle for his entire family. For a man with a college degree the career paths were wide-open and his chances of successful employment were even more robust. To achieve and maintain a middle-class lifestyle one didn’t need a double-income family and didn’t need to leave home and 6am and get home at 12am and be available on weekends. Since then “success” has been redefined. To be considered successful these days you have to negate your own self and turn into a machine.

Toiling away from paycheck to paycheck and working harder and longer hours is required nowadays just to keep one’s head above water. The world where business owners work 24/7/365 and everyone else works from 9 to 5 with an hour break for lunch is a fantasy. Let’s examine a minimum wage worker working shifts at Walmart. If he or she works 8 hours a day they would make roughly $15K a year. I would argue that if this person is presented with an opportunity to work longer hours or find another part-time job, say, at nearby Taco Bell, he would take it. Many do. We’ve all heard stories about people working 2-3 jobs. Or let’s even take an average Wall Street employee: no matter how entrepreneurial they might feel about themselves – they are still just glorified salary workers (with bonus). They are expected to be on-call 24/7 checking their blackberries at night and on weekends and they have acquiesced to this way of life as a default and some, in some masochistic way, even consider it a badge of honor. Working hard and especially reveling in your hard work is as American as apple pie. Our entire way of life now is treating the best-case scenario as a base-case scenario. In other words, there were times when working 8-hour days meant to be average and working 12-hour days and weekends meant to be successful. Now, for many, to work 12-hour days plus weekends is a given, a base-case scenario.

Humans have a great adaptive mechanism – we can get used to many things and we can accomplish remarkable feats especially if we’re in a survival mode. But we can only stretch our productivity so much, and after a certain point more workload becomes detrimental to an individual, counterproductive for companies, and eventually damaging to society. We physically can’t work more than 24 hours, we can’t be at 2 places at the same time, we can’t win on every trade. At some point there will be no room left to push harder. The benefits of longer hours and constant availability are becoming marginal. To take success onto the next level from what is considered successful career today is to become superhuman, develop magical powers or to rig the game. And if you have no way of doing it – you’re just an average, talentless, lazy schmuck. But don’t dare to complain about it – to complain is un-American.

There’s clearly an inflation of labor for those holding a wage job. Over the years the normalcy of 8-hour work days turned into 10-hour work days and then into 12-hour work days, but the benefits are failing to keep up with the contributing effort. The jobs for which a high-school diploma was sufficient, now require a college degree; and where before a college degree would provide job security for life, a graduate degree is required and yet it is no longer a guarantee of lifelong employment. It’s hard to say which came first: inflation of college degrees or inflation of labor. Surely, today this labor inflation can be attributed to high unemployment rate, but this phenomenon was prevalent even during the roaring years prior to the 2008 collapse.

The “moochers” that Republicans keep talking about are stretched too thin. They are one accident, one blown tire, one missed paycheck away from not being able to keep afloat. It is only in the imaginary world of self-declared “makers” everyone else lives off of the fruits of their labor. In the real world, “makers” expect everyone to be on call at all times for pennies and then have the chutzpah to accuse them of being lazy. Well, at least some in the GOP, who actually have to win elections rather than exercise their wits at the expense of an average Joe, are rediscovering that such attitude is damaging the brand. I’m following their transformation with great interest.

Another Conservative Supports Welfare Programs

First Bruce Bartlett, then Ramesh Ponnuru, and now David Frum via Ed Morrissey. Conservative intellectuals are reassessing their stance on welfare. Turns out it’s not such a bad thing at all. In some cases it can be practical.

In practical terms, the entitlement programs we have cannot be dismantled, as Randian purists would prefer. Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are too popular for repeal, and more importantly, deliver a level of living standards on which millions of Americans rely — standards that would plummet in these programs’ absence. Instead of denying that, practical conservatism would embrace that — because on the trajectory of current policy, these programs will utterly collapse at some point. There is, after all, nothing compassionate about a default, or about sticking succeeding generations with the bill for benefits we enjoy in the present.

Risk Taking and Finger Length (off topic)

This article explains everything!

“As strange as it may sound, the ratio of index to ring finger correlates with traits such as spatial ability, risk-taking, and assertiveness. It’s connected to success in competitive sports like soccer and skiing. Rustichini’s own work has connected it to real-life success, such as the profitability of London high-frequency financial traders.

Sure enough, their analysis of the photos found that the more successful the entrepreneur, the longer the ring finger compared to the index finger. The most successful entrepreneurs had ring fingers 10% to 20% longer than their index finger.”

Here’s my hand:

hand

 Here’s my recent stack:

poker

Turns out it’s all scientific!

Wow! Andrew Sullivan literally echoes my point that I made a few weeks ago here:
I said:

 “I’m trying to help the supporters of free markets. If the foundation of their ideology is weak, we all risk sliding into an alternative social order. If you can’t demonstrate that your system of belief is superior you only have yourself to blame if the assortment of Commies will have a stronger case (and public opinion) on their side. That is a major reason I support a stronger regulatory environment – not because I’m anti-business or anti-capitalist – but because I want to protect market participants from inadequate behavior that can discredit their philosophy and expose them and eventually the public to a harmful outcome.”

And here’s what he says:

 “Which is why many leaders in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, conservatives as well as liberals, attached a safety net to such an unsafe, bewildering, constantly shifting web of human demand and supply. They did so in part for humane reasons – but also because they realized that unless capitalism red in tooth and claw were complemented by some collective cushioning, it would soon fall prey to more revolutionary movements. The safety net was created to save capitalism from itself, not to attack capitalism.”

Andrew Sullivan's avatarThe Dish

SKOREA-SOCIETY-SUICIDE

The two concepts are usually seen in complete opposition in our political discourse. The more capitalism and wealth, the familiar argument goes, the better able we are to do without a safety net for the poor, elderly, sick and young. And that’s true so far as it goes. What it doesn’t get at is that the forces that free market capitalism unleashes are precisely the forces that undermine traditional forms of community and family that once served as a traditional safety net, free from government control. In the West, it happened slowly – with the welfare state emerging in 19th century Germany and spreading elsewhere, as individuals uprooted themselves from their home towns and forged new careers, lives and families in the big cities, with all the broken homes, deserted villages, and bewildered families they left behind. But in South Korea, the shift has been so sudden and so incomplete…

View original post 1,172 more words

Some conflicted professor has advice for Keynesians.

A confused professor thinks we, Keynesians, don’t understand Keynes at all. He thinks we think Keynes advocated for planned economy and proceeds to demonstrate that Keynes was at times a supporter of free markets. As such, Keynesians and progressives in general, in his view, lionize him for some ideas that he did not have. He doesn’t think we can support Keynes for the ideas that he actually professed, because in a conservative two-dimension world there are only two choices: free markets and communism and we must be for the latter.

 “Assumption is a mother of fuck up” – is one of my favorite expressions. The author of this article assumes a lot. For example right after he quotes Keynes: “the political problem of mankind is to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice and individual liberty” he proceeds to assume that Keynes was looking to force social justice at the cost of economic liberty and efficiency.  Why doesn’t he assume that Keynes was looking to force economic liberty at the cost of social justice and efficiency, or efficiency at the cost of social justice and economic liberty? Or why does he think that Keynes was looking to force anything at all, by merely stating a problem? Why such a conclusion?

I was getting more and more confused with the point the author was trying to make as I read a long. If, according to the author, Keynes was such a heavy-handed Commie, then how I can take the later argument that Keynes, after all, was for free markets, seriously?

“In addition, he believed in cutting taxes in recessionary times to stimulate economic activity and raising taxes during times of prosperity. This is contrary to the modern liberal philosophy of raising taxes and spending ad infinitum.”  WTF? Didn’t Obama just kept tax cuts for 98% of Americans, not to mention his tax cuts a few years ago that everyone forgot about?

Dean Kalahar claims to know what we, Keynes supporters, supposedly don’t know. He thinks we don’t know that Keynes wasn’t adamant about rejecting free markets when he delivers Keynes quote: “The engine which drives enterprise is not thrift, but profit” as some kind of revelation that will prompt us, Keynes supporters, to renounce him. He probably thinks that if we support government planned economy (a mistaken belief in itself), why would we waste our time with lukewarm and conflicted Keynes instead of aligning directly with the grandfather Marx himself?

“Whichever the case, if Keynes is the darling of the progressive left, they ought to have the guts and intellectual integrity to accurately portray the man they are canonizing and actually align their actions to his words.”  But we do! We do see the world like he did, in gray, not in black and white as Milton Friedman acolytes. We do believe in applying appropriate remedies as a certain situation requires, not a one-size-fits all laissez-faire free for all, all the time. We acknowledge that there are times to cut taxes and there are times to raise taxes. For conservatives, there are no circumstances under which taxes should be raised.

Why laissez-faire advocates are wrong to resist regulations.

My critique of unregulated markets does not stem from the fact that I long for a planned economy. Quite the contrary: I criticize the unregulated markets because their occasional failures revive the delusional far left theories that we all thought were put to rest a long time ago.  And when the free market advocates ran out of defensive arguments and when the evidence shows how wrong they were, then they are exposed to and defenseless against the public furor that, especially after what we’ve been through in the past 5 years, has a justifiable tendency to overreact. People like myself, who criticize the laissez faire system, are routinely portrayed as socialists by those who are too lazy to think. But we all witnessed, over the past few years, that there’s a point where competition and innovation give way to inertia, abandon, hubris and self-delusion. If such factors could be measured numerically, a replica of a Laffer curve would be appropriate to describe the predicament, where X axis is a number of innovations and Y axis is social utility of such innovations. At some point the relationship between the two breaks down and becomes negative.

Many supporters of free markets don’t see a problem here. When crises, like financial crisis of 2008 happen, they view it as a system glitch that would be self-corrected if only the government minded its own business. Some of my readers surely think that I’m a closeted Commie (although I’m merely a Keynesian), but there were times when I thought Milton Friedman, like Clapton, was God! I am, however, also a person who is moved by empirical evidence and if I see that there are too many exceptions to a theory then I begin to question the validity of such theory. Right now I see that people are not rational; that markets do not always self-correct; that there’s not always equal access to information between the transaction parties; that people can use agents that are self-interested, etc. All of this is enough, at least to me, to pause before marveling at the virtue of free markets. Milton Friedman was lucky that during his lifetime the economic circumstances seemed to confirm the superiority of his economic theory. I’ll quote:

“Friedman was also the beneficiary of the postwar economic boom and of global economic conditions that readily resonated with his ideas. During the period between the late 1960s and the mid-1970s, ‘his ideas seemed irresistibly prescient, and those of his numerous opponents repeatedly wrong’. Friedman did not face a world where economic planning enjoyed ideological hegemony. In such circumstances, his free-market liberalism was of the moment and his receipt of a Nobel Prize in 1976 merely confirmed this.”

Some conservative thinkers, even back in the 1970s when the free-market capitalism was clearly proving itself to be a superior social and economic order, realized the long-term fragility of this theory. Friedrich Hayek, the author of the conservative bible “The Road to Serfdom”, understood it even during the heyday of laissez-faire ideas. He realized that in the absence of the Soviet Union and its planned economy as an example of what not to do, there has to be a moral foundation for capitalism’s values. But there was none.

Irving Kristol (the father of William Kristol who founded the conservative Weekly Standard magazine) too criticized market advocates for promoting materialism and for fighting an ideological war that has largely been settled and urged conservatives back in the 1970 to begin to build a moral basis for capitalism. He noted that the new battle should be fought around values, that is, social values.

Conservatives tried to do that in subsequent decades, but the alliance between social conservatives and free market advocates always had an artificial feel to it, like a marriage of political expediency, not of natural compatibility. The former believe that the human nature is wicked and must be somehow controlled or restrained (either by religion or by some other methods); the latter believe in human rationality and ability to make the right decisions. It’s like mixing oil and water. It’s breaking right now before our very eyes.

If conservatives are so afraid of collectivist ideologies and believe that those will never go away completely, they have to build a solid defense against them rather than mock them. One day accusing your opponent of being a socialist might not suffice. In the 60s, 70s and 80s, the existence of a real life collectivist experiment made it possible for conservatives to demonstrate their moral superiority with ease, but now that the Soviet Union is gone the burden of proof is on the conservatives themselves. I suggest that the first step to build such a defense should be to embrace regulations. Free market advocates are afraid that by embracing regulations they will somehow admit the imperfections of their ideology; thus they are incapable of looking at regulations as a tool that can come in handy when confronted by hardcore Commies. (Note: I, of course, don’t think that Commies are coming – conservatives do). The obstinacy with which conservatives cling to free markets ideology makes them weaker when facing opponents that under normal circumstances can be easily defeated. Their tactics and strategies seem tone-deaf and oblivious to widespread public anger, both on the right and on the left. The equivalent of such tactic on the left would be a complete denouncement of a capitalism system. But those kinds of far-left voices, while existing on the fringes, are forcefully rejected by the mainstream Democrats who merely advocate a regulated capitalism and a modest increase in taxes, not a collectivist utopia. Keynesianism can be a salvation, not an inhibitor. If socialism, the real socialism comes to America, ironically, it will be the Democrats that are best equipped to fight it, not the Republicans.

I cannot stress this enough, so I will repeat myself. After you accuse me of being a socialist know this: I’m trying to help the supporters of free markets. If the foundation of their ideology is weak, we all risk sliding into an alternative social order. If you can’t demonstrate that your system of belief is superior you only have yourself to blame if the assortment of Commies will have a stronger case (and public opinion) on their side. That is a major reason I support a stronger regulatory environment – not because I’m anti-business or anti-capitalist – but because I want to protect market participants from inadequate behavior that can discredit their philosophy and expose them and eventually the public to a harmful outcome.

Krugman Again

Excellent analysis in today’s HuffPo.

Some of my readers know that when it comes to inflation and the deficit – the biggest concerns of CNBC talking heads, WSJ editorial page and conservatives in general – I’m a dove. That means that I do not think that addressing inflation and deficit should be as high on our list of priorities as addressing unemployment. In other words I’m an unemployment hawk and deficit dove. Just like Paul Krugman.

This “deficit” obsession of the media has completely overshadowed the real problem that plagues Americans today – unemployment. But unemployment doesn’t get the same amount of urgency of “experts” on TV.

I like to compare the current predicament (budget deficits vs. unemployment) to a person with too much credit card debt who just crashed his car: do you think that the amount of debt he has should prevent him from getting his car repaired immediately? Even if it means additional charges on a credit card? I think it shouldn’t, but according to deficit hawks it should. They argue that he should first reduce his credit card debt and only then go to the auto-repair shop. They don’t give the same degree of urgency to his ability to get around town and get to work as they do to the level of his indebtness.

There will be a time for us to address both inflation (that has stubbornly NOT appeared despite dire warning coming from various hawks for years) and the debt. But that time isn’t now.

Is David Mamet a Brain-Dead Conservative Now?

Liberalism is not at fault for making David Mamet into a brain-dead liberal before his epiphany a few years ago. If one considers himself, with or without jest, to be a “brain-dead liberal” it’s only a matter of time before he refuses to be one at some point. Good for him. We should appreciate people who refuse to become products of their environment and I’m sure Mamet put some serious reading and thinking into his decision.

It doesn’t seem that he put a lot of thinking into his recent article, in which he demands the government to get its hands off his guns. Mamet’s biggest beef with the government is that he thinks it decides what one “needs”. “Where in the Constitution is it written that the Government is in charge of determining “needs”? – he ponders.

The Government routinely decides our needs and deprives us of many things: we can’t smoke in public places; we can’t drive a car without a license; we can’t go out and buy plutonium at a drug store. Why does a government decide that we don’t “need” plutonium and that we “need” a driver’s license? What is the more probable reason the government acts in this manner – emerging tyranny or public safety concerns? Spectacular leaps of logic can befall even a brilliant playwright like Mamet, as demonstrated in this passage about the government: “One-size-fits-all,” and that size determined by the State has a name, and that name is “slavery.” Slavery?! US Government, however inefficient and bureaucratic, is a democratically elected body. Does Mamet suggest on how to improve it? No, he compares its approach to slavery and complains about its “one-size-fits-all” method in determining citizens’ needs. If it is “one-size-fits-all” approach that grates Mamet the most, then he should be equally indignant of the NRA, an unelected lobbying group, whose “one-size-fits-all” solution to gun violence – more guns in private hands – Mamet apparently approves of.

Surely, the playwright like David Mamet knows a thing or two about human nature. “We human beings, in the mass, are no damned good—that we are biddable, easily confused, and that we may easily be motivated by a Politician, which is to say, a huckster, mounting a soapbox and inflaming our passions.” Agreed! But then can’t we be equally inflamed and misled by inscrutable lobbying groups? And furthermore, if we’re so fallible shouldn’t Mamet at least pause before endorsing unregulated gun ownership? Shouldn’t he at least give a tepid support to mental and criminal background checks? He’s strangely defeatist on this: “The country is broke. Do we actually want another agency staffed by bureaucrats for whom there is no funding?”

He praises the constitutional checks and balances: “It was to guard us against this inevitable decay of government that the Constitution was written. Its purpose was and is not to enthrone a Government superior to an imperfect and confused electorate, but to protect us from such a government”, and yet he never abandons his defiant tone. Wouldn’t the very brilliance of the US Constitution prevent the Government from coming for his guns? Either the Constitution is brilliant in its division of powers, or the President is king who’s coming to take the guns – but not both.

People who support gun control are not liberal sissies. They just want to go about their daily life focusing on important things – families, jobs, businesses – without looking over their shoulder, without expecting the worst, without fending off criminals on their own. They decided that to delegate the security measures to the professionals on public payroll is more convenient than worrying about it on an individual level. But it is not an “either/or” proposition, as many gun advocates pretend to believe. Delegating security to the state doesn’t deprive individuals from owning guns (yes, because of the 2nd amendment). There are more than 300 million guns in private possession today. US government has to operate in that grey area between the 2nd Amendment and the duty to protect its citizens. Why doesn’t Mamet attempt to explore the cures for the government inefficiencies that he complains about, but instead pretends to be a victim of government overreach?  Is he prevented from getting a gun? Is his local school board prevented from getting a security guard? Our alternatives are not limited to completely deprive citizens of guns or to permit unrestricted access to all. Our options are something in between, and I’m beginning to think that fervent gun rights supporters like Mamet and Wayne LaPierre do not want to explore those because they are lazy at best, or willfully dishonest at worst. We know that they view the world in absolutes. LaPierre sees the world in black and white: “Good guys with a gun vs. Bad guys with a gun”, Mamet sees the world in black: “Humans are bad”. The concept of “social contract” does not resonate with such a worldview. So they both come to conclusion that more unchecked guns is the solution.  

I think I understand why Mamet abandoned his liberal stance a few years ago. It’s possible that after living on the liberal fringes his entire life, observing the Prius driving tree-huggers, the vegans, the Palestine loving “self-hating” Jews, he realized that he’s not one of them. But before exploring the number of possible alternatives – one can eat meat, drive a BMW, support Israel and still be a liberal – he jumped right into the depths of conservatism that deals in mirror opposite concepts. It’s like he didn’t realize that the political middle even exists. In his attempt to ablute himself off that abominable Hollywood liberal stain he, like a fresh religious convert, is trying very hard to prove his conservative bona fides to the fringes in his new home.

Someone please tell David Mamet that there’s a vast grey area between brain-dead liberalism and brain-dead conservatism and, perhaps, he should give it a look.

Why there are no shootings on Wall Street?

Why have no one ever gone postal on Wall Street? Is it not a back-stabbing, competitive, survival of the fittest shark tank? How many were passed over for promotion or stiffed around the bonus time? How many untold grievances have been absorbed and internalized to never be addressed in a violent manner? Greg Smith clearly was driven to the breaking point and yet he found a legitimate, albeit an omerta breaking, way of addressing his complaints.

First of all, it takes a special pedigree to join the ranks on Wall Street. People like Alex Jones would never have passed through the interview process. He would have a hard time hiding his oozing craziness. A silent, studious type, like the Newtown shooter, would also not fare well during the interview. I’ve heard many stories from frustrated headhunters when their brilliantly credentialed PhDs in math and physics couldn’t put a sentence together during the chat with a head of the trading desk. At the point where you made it to the actual interview, the hiring manager doesn’t care about your illustrious resume; he tries to gauge if he can sit next to you for 10 hours a day. He wants to assess whether or not you’re a weirdo, a douche or a “schmuck on wheels”. To get hired on Wall Street one has to project jocularity but not disrespect, charm but not servility, acumen but not conceit, thoughtfulness but not stupor, earnestness but not wild-eye fervor. They want to see if you’re “one of us, a good fella, a wise guy”. At one once venerable but now defunct bond shop they used to say “give me a poor and hungry kid from Brooklyn with a degree from Columbia”. They were essentially looking for a guy who wants to get shit done, get paid and is secure enough to take some level of abuse. There have always been a cache of such kids.

Such screening process weeds out a large number of oddballs. Weak, insecure egos like NRA loudmouths or underappreciated geniuses, like smart quiet loners, don’t make it that far but if miraculously they do, Wall Street has a way of molding them. That is not to say there are no psychos on Wall Street. But those kinds of psychos, when crossed, are not looking to go in a postal way. They can make a more memorable statement with a click of a mouse than with a machine gun. But at any level of the food chain, from the abused new recruits to the highest ranks, all accumulated grievances – against management or against colleagues – are mitigated by the Great Expectation. The Great Expectation is, of course, either an upcoming bonus or a promotion, or an opportunity to make a spectacular trade or all of the above and it is a powerful pacifier of any violent tendencies one might otherwise unleash. The employees in most other industries do not have such a powerful release mechanism. Then there are other, more mundane factors: bankers got expenses and a certain way of life – mortgages, wives at home, kids in private schools. It’s just too much to lose. To show up with a gun at work is to suffer the deepest ignominy, to be known forever as a douchebag, an anti-Mensch; and to condemn your surviving family to a humiliating existence. That’s worse than death.

Since we can’t administer the Wall Street screening process to every citizen and since we can’t award everyone a bonus, perhaps we can consider the following measure of fitness to carry a gun. Comedian Chris Rock made a great point about having a mortgage as a requirement to owning a gun. “Every mass shooting is done by guys who live with their mother. So I believe you should need to have a mortgage to buy a gun. A mortgage is a real background check. Even if you go to jail for 30 years, you’ve still got to pay your f—king mortgage.”

Having a mortgage will make you think twice before you decide to go in a memorable way. I do not, however, advocate loosening the lending requirements in an attempt to turn potential psychos into upstanding homeowners. We all know what can happen when we give away mortgages to all kinds of delinquents. Precisely!! In the aftermath of the mortgage crisis banks are now extremely prudent in deciding whom they are extending the mortgages to. Shouldn’t we then adopt the same kind of approach when it comes to gun ownership? Our goal should not be to have as many people with mortgages as possible so that they can buy guns. Our goal should be to allow gun purchases to the people who have demonstrated that they are responsible and prudent enough to be able to own a mortgage. Mortgage and, to the delight of conservatives, I’ll throw marriage in there too, should be a criterion for getting a gun. Alec Baldwin’s character from The Departed distills it simply: “Married guys seem more stable; people see the ring they think at least someone can stand the son of a bitch.” If you insist on defending your castle from intruders, you first have to demonstrate that you have it. And this approach will be applauded by budget hawks as there will be no additional spending required by establishing background checking venues – as mortgage, in itself, is a thorough qualifier.

There’s a palpable dichotomy between the qualities one is required to possess before being allowed near spreadsheets on Wall Street vs. the loose qualifications one needs in order to get a gun. Managing money gets more gravity of consideration than acquiring a tool whose only function is to kill. Perhaps, using mortgage and/or marriage as a requirement for owning a gun offers a simple solution that even conservatives can’t object to.