Carl Remick wrote:
>In that respect, I think the soft underbelly of the free-market
>position would be lack of transparency that contributed to the
>magnitude of the Enron collapse. But, Doug, you've seemed reluctant
>in the past to identify this as a key issue -- e.g., I recall your
>commen
Transparency is a big problem for free-marketeers.
It is clearly a constituent part of efficiency, but
its pursuit in the real world affronts corporations
and leads some conservatives to defend lack of transparency
as a property right. Asymmetric information is of course
a major topic for Stiglit
Carl Remick wrote:
>
>
> >
> >If you're going to fight an ideological opponent, you should have
> >some sense of what the opponent thinks.
> >
> >Doug
>
You fight an ideological opponent by striving to change the reality
which generates the ideology, which is the spontaneous reflection in
hu
>Max Sawicky wrote:
>
>>The mere fact of a company failing,
>>even a large one, is not a market failure.
>
>I'm away on an inter-holiday retreat, and only sporadically checking
>email, so someone else may have made this point already. No free
>marketeer would ever regard a big failure as an indict
Gene writes:
> Max, I read the big push to define the Enron affair as
> criminal as an effort to
> suggest that there is nothing wrong with the functioning of
> the market, just
> some bad apples who everybody thought were good apples...
Max writes:
> You could read it that way, but whether or
You could read it that way, but whether or not
the affair does point to an inherent problem with
markets is another matter. Choice and imperfect
law creation/enforcement make illegal acts possible;
that doesn't mean the underlying arrangement isn't
the best available.mbs
Max, I read the big
I would say the relevant test in this context is whether
the product kept flowing to customers at prices that
covered production costs. The California crisis is
clearly an example of consumptis interruptis, but no
role of Enron's bankruptcy in that crisis has been
raised, as far as I know. So I
