What's next? A DOJ bubble blog?
You may have heard that in October the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division launched a Web site "to educate consumers and policymakers about the potential benefits that competition can bring to consumers of real estate brokerage services". The Web site includes "a calculator to help consumers tally their potential savings when brokers pursuing new business models compete for their business".
It's as close to an endorsement of discount brokerage as your government and mine can get. That's remarkable. It's like the Feds setting up a Web site that calculates the "potential saving" of buying a ten-year-old Honda instead of a new model. Or the "potential savings" of buying your meds through the mail instead of at your neighborhood pharmacy. Or the "potential savings" of buying your groceries at Big Lots instead of the local supermarket.
No, it's like your government using your tax dollars to help your customers "tally their potential savings" if they use your cut-rate, corner-cutting competitor down the street. Your government, acting as sole judge, jury and executioner of your business model, listening only to hostile testimony and acting outside any court of law, deciding that you're a menace and that your customers should know this about you.
Like I said, that's remarkable.
I haven't gone to the site because I've already read the script they banged out during the FTC hearings. Big Banking, trying to nose its way into real estate brokerage, grinds its very large axe on real estate's traditional and time-proven business model. Now, if anyone thinks bankers are staunch advocates of the little guy, I've got a well-located bridge I can sell them.
And in the other corner we have woolly academics, most of whom—but not all, I suspect; even woolly academics have bills to pay—really believe the markets-at-the-mercy-of-demonic-forces nonsense they serve up in the service of the banking industry and their own careers. In some cultures these folks would still be suitably attired in animal headdresses, dancing and shaking large gourds to scare off evil spirits. They've adapted to Western culture by wearing cardigan sweaters and calling themselves scientists.
And in the center of the ring are the regulators, bumbling and stumbling, looking first over one shoulder for political guidance, then over the other to see if the peanut gallery is still applauding.
Your tax dollars at work. Like Barnum & Bailey, only not quite as honest.
The irony of the DOJ's Web site, and the FTC witch hunt it's based on, is that they're the Bush Administration's kick in the teeth to some of the Republican Party's most ardent supporters: real estate agents. Yes, like many "self-made" individuals, most agents I've talked politics to are slightly to the right of Fox News. Never mind that most of us are self-made only in the sense that we astutely picked the right genes, parents and environment to grow up in. Never mind that most of us rugged self-made heroic-type individuals prosper only when firmly nestled in the paternalistic bosom of Big Government. Never mind that most of these self-same rugged self-made individuals would last maybe a day tops in the no-quarter-given-no-quarter-asked mid-Victorian world they yearn to send us back to.
It's been a truism since, oh, the 1870s that the Republican Party is deep in the pocket of "Eastern financial interests". Since then, for better or worse, those "Eastern financial interests" have lost some of their relevance, immediacy and evil luster. Folks just aren't run off their farms by frock-coated bankers or ruined by black-hearted cartels as often as they used to be. First Nixon, then Reagan, even managed to sell the little guy the idea that the Republican Party was the party of the little guy.
Here's a fascinating historical tidbit: those "Eastern financial interests" have been know to pull a fast one on even the little guys in their own party. In the 1940s rock-ribbed Republicans wanted a prickly Midwestern arch-conservative named Robert Taft as their presidential candidate. They got smooth-talking New Yorker Thomas Dewey instead. Twice. In 1964 rock-ribbed Republicans wanted a prickly Western arch-conservative named Barry Goldwater as their presidential candidate. They almost got smooth-talking New Yorker Nelson Rockefeller instead.
Nowadays the big financial interests think real estate brokerage would make a swell loss leader for their lending operations. (Picture your teller selling your house.) Current law prohibits this, but when you're the Bush Administration and bankers ask you to jump, your first and only question is "how high?" So now the hundreds of thousands of little guys (and gals) who make up the real estate industry know exactly how it feels to have the Federal Government take an active dislike to you.
I don't know how many of those little guys and gals plan on voting for anyone who isn't a Republican next year. I also don't know how many Republican real estate agents listen to 1930s bluesman Robert Johnson, but I do have a feeling they could relate to "Hellhound On My Trail".