John T. Reed’s news blog

In the course of writing my principal residence book I made a discovery that I did not realize before.   The path I took was to buy apartment buildings as fast as I could starting when I was 22. The path I SHOULD have taken was to buy only principal residences one at a time and devoted the down payment money and time I devoted to dealing with rentals to my principal residence instead. The principal residence would have take infinitely less of my time. I would have been sued about real estate not at all. I would have avoided a...

Interesting column by Andy Kessler in the WSJ on 6/1/20. I will just riff on the same subject. Covid 19 has been what I call an unethical experiment. By that I mean that you would never shut down the nation to see what would happen. But for various reasons, the experiment has been launched and is ongoing. Need structural change in education One of the structural changes that may result is extreme change in the eduction establishment from Head Start to K-12 to college. Extreme change that will make education more cost effective and that will greatly reduce the pay,...

I am done with the “peaceful protesters.” They are liars. They are standing next to and in front of the rock throwers. They are accomplices. They stand between the cop and thugs. By doing so, they protect the thugs. They make it hard to identify the thugs. . They welcome the thugs on the grounds that they think the thugs may get them somewhere politically. They claim to oppose criminal behavior but they are hypocrites. They stand idly by as the thuggery happens six feet away. They do not identify the thugs to the police. They rarely ask the thugs...

Mary Anastasia O’Grady has a column in the WSJ about how liberals in Canada are gleefully celebrating the pain their oil and gas sector is suffering and dancing on its grave. Interesting Alberta and Saskatchewan The two main oil/gas provinces in Canada are Alberta and Saskatchewan. During the OPEC oil embargoes in 1973 and 1979, Canada was beating up on those provinces. There was much talk in Alberta and Saskatchewan then about their seceding from Canada and joining the US. Alberta and Saskatchewan are also Canada’s best agricultural provinces. The law of secession from Canada Here is what Wikipedia says...

Big announcement I have decided I oppose owning condos. It sort of goes without saying that I also oppose timeshares. When I first got out of the Army, my first job was selling condos. I worked seven days a week for about six months, sold 18 of them, and never got paid a penny. The appraiser said they were not worth what I sold them for. “Eighteen, not two,” I said. He was not impressed. The lender that had committed to finance the sales refused. They were all cancelled. And the building was turned into a rental apartment building. Rare...