On Mar 9, 2009, at 3:50 PM, Stefano Mori wrote: > > On 2009-Mar-08, at 18:29, Chris Gehlker wrote: > >> It is easy to find examples of markets that are very far from >> perfect, very expensive to regulate, and simply can't be made >> anywhere near perfect for reasonable social cost. Real estate is one >> example because no piece of property is a perfect substitute for any >> other and because so much of the value of any piece of property is >> composed of positive externalities due to public and private >> investment in nearby property. The question isn't whether or not to >> regulate, the question is how and how much. Anybody advocating >> either zero regulation or enough regulation to make the market >> nearly perfect is probably an ideologue who should be regarded >> with suspicion. >> >> I get upset and a little fearful when I hear someone like Giethner >> go on TV and talk about disappointed he is in Wall Street executives >> who are making 'the system' fail by acting to maximize their >> personal wealth. If people behaved so as to maximize social well >> being rather than their individual well being, we wouldn't need >> either a market or a government. I want to say "Really? You >> supported the dismantling[1] of the regulatory structure during the >> Clinton years and later because you thought Wall Street was >> populated with altruistic Marxists?" > > > Aye, if anyone is looking to generalize that no market is "perfect", > then the other side is also true, that no regulatory effort is > "perfect". (In keeping with your sig today, we honor both poles in a > sort of Zen way). > > Otherwise we'd be heading towards saying that the market is full of > poorly informed, irrational, selfish jerks, whilst government is run > by altruistic aliens with IQs of ten million and googleplexes of > accurate data. >
Well the market (financial sector i mean) is full of mostly ill- informed jerks that are very selfish. No one is a trader or broker for any altrusitic reason. They are there to make a lot of money s fast as possible. Most brokers don't last long as it is. Between the stress and the very alpha nature of the sector. The government, while not loaded with geniuses does tend toward altruism in the sense that regulation is there to protect. > So does that leave us with a case-by-case list of things which > sometimes the market can do better, and sometimes the government can > do better? Even cases where the market is far from desirable by any > objective measure, but regulatory efforts would make things worse, due > to the government lacking information, lacking political honesty, > being prone to the whims of interest groups, inertia, and even just > the occurrence of unintended consequences? From everything I've seen regulation is very rarely something that has a negative impact on any market in the long run. It's the lack of regulation, or worse, the lack of will to enforce existing regulation that causes problems. I've not seen one modern example of de- regulation that has helped the consumer in the long run. Some recent examples beyond the financial sector include the California energy de-regulation. The slowly crumbling proper regulation done by the FCC. The airline industry de-reg. None of them has, in the long run, proven beneficial. The role of government in this case is to protect these markets from themselves so as to protect the consumer. Note these are cases where the economic and consumer impact of no regulation is the key. Regulating things like movie ratings and video game ratings is, rightly, outside of government purview imho. There is no economic or other impact here. In this case self-regulation is fine in an industry because we are, in essence, talking about cultural tastes and accepted norms. I think it is important to make a distinction between regulation to protect markets and citizens versus regulation to protect what is in the end ill-defined cultural norms regarding decency and the like. --Larry _______________________________________________ OSX-Nutters mailing list | [email protected] http://lists.tit-wank.com/mailman/listinfo/osx-nutters List hosted at http://cat5.org/
