Anita Kumar and Rosalind Helderman report that Virginia is once again a red state:

Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) has quietly declared April 2010 Confederate History Month, bringing back a designation in Virginia that his two Democratic predecessors — Mark Warner and Tim Kaine — refused to do.

Sen. A. Donald McEachin (D-Richmond) said he was “stunned” to learn of McDonnell’s decision and even more stunned that the proclamation did not include any reference to slavery. “It’s offensive,” he said.

The language can be seen on the governor’s Web site.

It’s important to note that this isn’t simply someone going along with a longstanding abhorrent bit of symbolism that’s traditional in his state. Mark Warner, rightly, broke this tradition and refused to grant wink-nod symbolic affirmation of the idea of unleashing massive violence in defense of the principle that white people should own black people as property. Tim Kaine upheld the new status quo. And now McDonnell’s ondoing it, which is offensive on its own terms and will also raise the political cost to any future governor who wants to do the right thing.

In other news, since the RNC is determined to stick with Michael Steele come what may, I’m sure black people will start loving Republicans soon.

Felix Salmon has a long post reproducing many charts from a Fannie Mae document demonstrating that the American romance with homeownership is far from over. Apparently 70 percent of the public believes that buying a home is a safe investment, almost as high as the number (74) who think a savings account is safe, and way more than the number (50) who think “buying government or corporate bonds” is safe. I’d be interested to know what efficient markets theory has to say about widespread and persistent misperceptions about this kind of thing.

At any rate, it seems that in America it’s always a good time to buy a house:

I think this, however, is probably the most important part of Salmon’s post:

It’s worth noting, in this context, that the top two reasons to buy a home are that “it means having a good place to raise children and provide them with a good education”; and “you have a physical structure where you and your family feel safe”. Reading between the lines here, I think that what we’re seeing is the effect of rental ghettoes, and the fact that neighborhoods with high levels of homeownership tend to be safer, and have better schools, than neighborhoods which are mostly owned by landlords. That’s a negative aspect of homeownership, in the grand scheme of things, but it’s clearly here to stay: no one’s anticipating a more sensible world where it’s commonplace to be able to rent a house in a good school district.

Right. If you first immerse yourself in anti-homeownership arguments and then go out and look at the actual country, renting a home turns out to be surprisingly impractical in a variety of situations. Outside of New York City, the market for rental properties that you can confidently stay in long-term (not just a house whose owner is living someplace else and might kick you out of next year) is very thin, and concentrated on serving the segment of the population that doesn’t have the means to put a downpayment together. If we could shift off that equilibrium—something that would start to happen if we began to phase out the mortgage interest tax deduction—we’d do ourselves a lot of good.

I’ve been waiting for about a week for an example to make this point, but couldn’t think of one, and along rides Tim Lee to the rescue:

To see why [right-of-center hostility to unlicensed spectrum] is wrong, it’s worth thinking about the debate over carbon emissions. In a sense, this is also a debate over scarcity. One side favors treating the atmosphere’s ability to absorb carbon as a commons (Jerry [Brito] would probably call it an “open access” regime, but I use the “common” terminology), allowing anyone to emit carbon dioxide without legal restrictions. The other side believes that this will lead to a tragedy of the commons, and so they favor a property-rights-oriented approach. The weird thing is that the left and right in the carbon debate are on the opposite sides from the positions they occupy in the spectrum debate. In the spectrum debate, a commons is considered a “left-wing” position, while property rights are considered “right-wing.” In contrast, in the carbon debate you find right-wingers advocating a “carbon commons” while left-wingers advocate a property-like regime called cap and trade.

I think this is very insightful. Where it goes wrong, though, is in concluding that there’s something “weird” about this inversion. I think if you look at political conflict you’ll see that attitudes toward property rights are really all over the map. I like the idea of allowing people to build more densely, which would be a form of strengthening property rights, whereas Cato’s Randal O’Toole doesn’t like this idea at all. The main difference between left and right with regard to property rights is simply that the right is invested in a lot of rhetoric about markets and property rights and the left is invested in different historical and rhetorical tropes.

To borrow an idea from Robin Hanson, I think it’s useful to think about political conflict in terms of valorized figures. On the right, you see a lot of valorization of businessmen. On the left, you see a lot of valorization of pushy activists who want to do something businessmen don’t like. Formally, the right is committed to ideas about free markets and the left is committed to ideas about economic equality. But in practice, political conflict much more commonly breaks down around “some stuff some businessmen want to do” vs “some stuff businessmen hate” rather than anything about markets or property rights per se. Consequently, on the left people sometimes fall into the trap of being patsies for rent-seeking mom & pop operators when poor people would benefit more from competition from a corporate bohemoth.

Or iff you look at the energy sector, you’ll see that businessmen want to push property rights for the stuff that’s in the ground (coal, oil, whatever) and a commons model for the stuff (particulates, CO2) that’s in the air. You can call that “inconsistent” if you like, but obviously it’s perfectly consistent with what coal and oil executives want! And those industries are the most loyal supporters of “right” politics around.