Thanks for the perspective, SilverSurfer_OG.
Mind if I draw a distinction? There may have been a point of contention over central monetary authority but there was consensus on free markets regulating themselves.
If Greenspan fell away from Rand decades ago, why did he wait until he was walking out the door to acknowledge? IMO, that's more fuel to suggest that Greenspan believed free markets could regulate themselves.
"AND Fraud has ALWAYS been regulated"
Maybe in theory. Investment markets weren't regulated until Glass Stegall. The distribution of food and drugs weren't cumulatively regulated until the inception of FDA. Worker safety wasn't regulated until OSHA. Environmental standards weren't regulated until EPA. Not enough space here to arguably demonstrate that markets never regulated themselves.
Without enforcement, regulation equals a former mine executive overseeing mine safety. (Big money in those pillars, lets see how many we can profit from while defending miner deaths as unavoidable.) Big oil over big oil. Enron, MCI, Arthur Anderson etc over Enron, MCI, Arthur Anderson etc.
The "market" is a cloud. It's innate nature neither produces nor negates regulation. That's up to the people that comprise the market.
Reading that a free marketeer endorses fraud regulation is refreshing. Suggesting we've always regulated is rather perplexing.
It's not that I resist proven principles. You can verify that by exampling successful "market regulation."
Good points, Hempkat.
If we could re-separate investment and commercial banking, I wouldn't necessarily moan from fat cats sailing the ionosphere. IMO, I-want-it-all-and-I want-it-now could, quite possibly should be there for the folks that want to play.
I'd just like to play the low risk, long term diversified game, free and clear of being sucked into the abyss of shisters. Not trying to be silly and suggest there's no risk but prior to 1999, long-term diversification virtually guaranteed a decent nest egg. Might still get there but I'm now crossing me fingers.
Yep, lol. As soon as we get something that's supposed to help, lawyers and loopholes rise to the surface. I'm the last to know where to draw the line but we need a big, fat, permanent Sharpie for the job.
lol that you think Cannabis isnt regulated. illegality is regulation to the maximum. the price is consistently inflated and quality is consistently depressed.
you make the assumption that regulatory laws are typically passed to suppress crime and corruption, when in fact they are enacted to streamline it and consolidate power into the hands of the few.
rules were meant to be broken. people still commit murder despite the possibility of the death penalty in a number of states/countries. do you think that murder should instead go unpunished due to the failure of the death penalty?
-iD
Yep, lol. As soon as we get something that's supposed to help, lawyers and loopholes rise to the surface. I'm the last to know where to draw the line but we need a big, fat, permanent Sharpie for the job.
Man is not only the most individual being on earth; he is also the most social being.
– Mikhail Bakunin
As Donne reminds us, No man is an island, at least if he attains to the order, the harmony – that “pleasing combination of the elements” – for which he naturally yearns. Alone against the elements, man is as nothing, scratching out an existence unfit for his kind and indeed destructive of it, selfless because, in having no others with whom to associate, no true self exists. But in that convivium – that “living together” – a self emerges, or at least the reflection of a self, into which he gazes and through which he begins not only to act but to act human, the goal of which is always the satisfaction of the acting man’s desires. And that, as we have said, is the source and sustenance of the social enterprise:
Society is concerted action, cooperation … the outcome of conscious and purposeful behavior. … Individual man is born into a socially organized environment. In this sense alone we may accept the saying that society is – logically and historically – antecedent to the individual. In every other sense this dictum is either empty or nonsensical. The individual lives and acts within society. But society is nothing but the combination of individuals for cooperative effort.
In seeing that it was out of this cooperative effort that civil society’s Twin Pillars – money and law – evolved, it is clear that in order for “the final form of human government” to indeed be final (inasmuch as humanity remains subject to material scarcity and thus to the demands of homo economicus), gold and the golden rule must be put back on their foundations. They must be returned to their rightful owners, that is, leaving us with one last question so far as societal governance is concerned. For in debunking the state, including and especially the “democratic” state, it would appear that we have debunked democracy as well, and that the collapse of the democratic state therefore means the death of democracy. On the contrary, however, the collapse of the democratic state will mean the birth of genuine democracy. For as the mechanism whose modus operandi is compulsion and coercion is displaced by the organism whose modus vivendi is voluntary cooperation, democracy in the form of majority rule will give way to democracy in the form of individual rule. That is, the individual, as a sovereign unto himself, will rule over himself, the devolutionary process rendering the fraud of representative/ constitutional democracy null and void amid the flowering of a participatory, and thus truly social, democracy rooted in a negative – i.e., non-interventionist – rule of law.
It will be market democracy, in other words, and while everyone will not have the same number of “votes” – i.e., the same amount of purchasing power – the tendency will be in this direction, as the enormous, state-induced disparities between rich and poor narrow over time (even as vastly more wealth is created) and society moves toward a state of equilibrium that is steady not because it doesn’t change but because it changes steadily, spontaneously generating more and more order.
Will it be utopia? Yes, and emphatically so, for the simple reason that “Utopianism is compatible with everything but determinism,” which is to say, with everything but the state. And as the state atrophies, we can therefore expect utopia – “nowhere” – to appear first here, then there, in this form and that, at once experimental and experiential, until it is everywhere, evolving as one, under the direction of no one and everyone at the same time, and doing so, again, without limit:
Since man is always acting, he must always be engaged in trying to attain the greatest height on his value scale, whatever the type of choice under consideration. There must always be room for improvement in his value scale; otherwise all of man’s wants would be perfectly satisfied, and action would disappear. Since this cannot be the case, it means that there is always open to each actor the prospect of improving his lot, of attaining a value higher than he is giving up, i.e., of making a psychic profit.”
How much “psychic profit” is humanity capable of generating? If there “must always be room for improvement in his value scale,” how much room can man, in that convivium, make? Given that he does not live by bread alone, how far beyond bread can man live? How far beyond the margin of subsistence, in other words, can he in fact go?
We conclude this series with an answer that could well be as probable as it is seemingly impossible, the title of which we withhold with a wink, a nod, and profound thanks for the service that this extraordinary site provides to the cause of human freedom and thus to humanity itself.
citation- Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom, ICS Press, 1990 (Oxford University, 1953), pp. 90 and 91.
Prohibition is not regulation it is prohibition. The cannabis that is cultivated is grown despite prohibition and the gardener is free to grow their crop as they best see fit (avoiding detection and the prohibitionists is a chief priority ).
I think that DiscoBiscuit argues that regulation can reduce corruption and increase quality. I in fact agree with you that regulation as it is know in the USA is for consolidating power in the hands of the few at the expense of the many.
I wish you didn't dislike formatting what comprises very comprehensive issues and the ideals they beget. I have to page back to stay relevant (and that's equally maddening.) Would be much easier to format each pertinent point you make... respectively. But I'll work with you in the spirit that your ideals are as valid as anyone else'. We just disagree what's best for all. You approach from the individual liberties perspective and I advocate the responsible and successful collective. Differences of opinion are good because neither of us are entitled to lone-gun our principles on the populous. We both have equal chance to persuade others yet we need mandates to advance in that direction.Disco, I like your idea of not regulating cannabis. As for regulating other industries I don't see the value ad that regulators infer that they help create.
All the frauds and recalls happen despite regulation and rules.
You are correct that I would not mandate anyone do anything. I am a strong believer in caveat emptor (let the buyer beware). As a great example the "ratings agencies" (s&p, moodies, and finch) all rated sub prime crap as AAA. These rating agencies ARE regulated AND congress mandated that you PAY one of these three CON BUSINESSES to rate your products if you wished to sell them in the REGULATED financial markets.
As for food, "Food Inc." has some great scenes with a responsible natural farmer in VA. He has to break regulations and challange the FDA in order to make his product as fresh and healthy as possible. The FDA wanted all his chickens to be slaughtered INSIDE a closed environment despite the farmers PROVEN results that out door fresh air slaughtered chickens have FEWER bacteria and problems than the FDA approved indoor method.
I wouldn't mandate anything because those that want to scam and defraud will do so IRRESPECTIVE of rules and laws. Regulations only hamper good business people who AREN'T trying to scam, because the scammers WRITE and IGNORE the rules as they see fit.
I don't trust the government one bit. The treatment of cannabis and food are just some examples. Any rules set out by an immoral government does nothing to help me feel that farmers will know what they have to do in order to be safe. Profitable is fucking laughable as a result of listening to the government. The government has NEVER done anything profitably and in no way can enlighten an honest business person in what must be done in order to be profitable.
I actually see increased bureaucracy as a HUGE sign of the collapse. Red tape has killed as many economies as war.
Regulation didn't cause Moody's etc to rate (crap) AAA. The industry did that. The industry persuaded Moody's etc that a single AAA mortgage could back as many as 30 pieces of crap. Like a diamond in a giant turd. Then, the industry was afraid they'd be reigned in if they didn't insure the turd wouldn't stink.
Who allowed Moody's etc to rate turds anyway? The repeal of Glass Stegall aka deregulation.
Then industry bet the turd would stink. Doesn't it sound a bit stanky that regulation actually regulated fraud as legal?
This last point is my whole point. Regulation as know in the USA is just one economic actor imposing his will on ALL other actors. There are no better outcomes from regulation, only different outcomes where more than normal are screwed over.