Here in Ireland, house prices are going down.

One owner in Dublin has dropped his offer price five times - by 100,000 euros. In Waterford, a typical price has come down 90,000 euros. And in County Wicklow, there’s a photo of a house that has come down 65,000 euros. The Irish Independent says, “Prices have come down consistently, all through 2007.”

What is still shocking to the foreigner is how little you get for your money in Ireland. The house that sold for nearly $1 million in Dublin looks like a very modest semi-suburban house…worth maybe $200,000 in Houston. And the house in Co. Wicklow that is now on offer for $300,000 is a “semi-detached” three-bedroom model of the sort you’d expect to get for, say, $150,000 in Florida.

As predicted, politicians in the United States are taking up an anti-business, anti-greed, anti-globalization line of guff.

Huckabee, for example, is whining about corporate bonuses and losing American jobs to offshore competitors. Hillary, too, is kvetching that the middle class is getting a bad deal. And Edwards has been pandering to the rabble from the get-go.

Now the Chamber of Commerce is fighting back, vowing to spend $60 million to “punish anti-business candidates.”

“We plan to build a grass-roots business organization so strong that when it bites you in the butt, you bleed,” chamber President Tom Donohue said.

Our guess is that ‘you ain’t seen nothing yet.’ Once the middle class really comes to understand how it has been ruined, populist scoundrels are going to sound almost reasonable.

Bill Bonner

For The Daily Reckoning Australia

Bill Bonner [send him mail] is the founder and president of Agora Publishing, one of the world's most successful consumer newsletter publishing companies, and the author of the free daily e-mail The Daily Reckoning. He is the author, with Addison Wiggin, of New York Times Business best sellers "Financial Reckoning Day: Surviving the Soft Depression of The 21st Century" and "Empire of Debt: The Rise Of An Epic Financial Crisis", and with Lila Rajiva, "Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets". Copyright © 2008 Bill Bonner