Poll

I am quite undecided about this turn of events in the housing market. Banks’ mail jingles as borrowers walk is the headline on a commentary by James Saft. For anyone who hasn’t come across the phrase “jingle mail” yet, it describes the phenomenon of homeowners walking away from a home because the debt owed is greater than its current value—and so, they mail the keys to the lender. The unmistakable signal jingle mail sends is, “I’m done here. The house is yours.”—thus breaking the mortgage contract. Is that wrong? I’ve seen a fair bit of commentary arguing both ways; but none of it has been from a pro-freedom perspective.

One of the things some people are only now becoming aware of—and it’s happening now because of the increased focus on this sector of the financial industry, methinks—is that a nontrivial amount of Wall Street transactions are currently unregulated by federal and/or state law. As a New York Times article suggests, that seems about to change. Problem is, it won’t change in the direction that will help.

I discovered that Drupal has a built-in module for doing polls. Whee! However, I haven’t figured out how to have it automagically published, either here in the bloggy area or as a sidebar feature. So, for now, I’ll simply point to it from this post, and encourage relevant comments to be posted here.

The poll asks the question, “What do you think is the most important thing a parent can give to a young child?”. I think that anyone who wants to may vote—one needn’t be signed up here to cast a vote. If that is true and some of you wish to make a comment without registering, I’ll do my best to accommodate you. Please either email or PM me at GYHD or The Boondocks with your comment and some means of attribution—either a ’nym or just plain “anonymous” is fine with me. Although ... if we have 27 different anonymice it will be difficult to keep track of the conversation. Maybe label yourself Anonymouse #X? We can worry about the details should that become necessary.

Anyway, the poll will run for a week; and I’ll keep this post atop the blog for that duration. Have at it, if you wish.