[quote=Noob]Someone a lot smarter than me made a point regarding regulation that makes sense to me. The economy is clearly and has clearly been regulated–just look at all the sox requirments in place now. Its a joke to think that we have had anything near a “free market”. The current economic problems were not caused by a free market, but by a mis-regulated market. More regulation is not the fix. Why should we trust the same government that mis-regulated the market in the first place to get it right this time around?[/quote]
It is so amusing to hear the tired howls of panic on this board and endless babble about the purest form of imaginary economic bliss. Sure, anyone can see that this year we are adopting some reforms espoused by Ronald Dworkin’s equality of resources theory or the similar Theory of Justice espoused by John Rawls. [natural endowments of intelligence and talent are morally arbitrary and ought not to affect the distribution of resources in society] What do you expect after distribution of wealth (blame Hilton) is used by populists to make that point. You can always bring back the poll tax, but enough.
How about we join the real world and confront reality as it exists here. As long as we have $1000/hr lawyers on Wall St and K St that write the laws, we will NEVER have to be worry about that socialism problem. Who wrote/sponsored the 1996 capital gains home exclusion bill? Who wrote/sponsored the 1999 Gramm bank deregulation bill? Only dem to sign was President Clinton. So this time, this whole mess WAS Clinton’s fault. If just one of these bills had not been signed, we would not have had as big a problem with the banks.
FDIC did not do its job as WAMU was allowed to gamble with taxpayer money. That was not mis-regulation, that was a sign of NO regulation last 10 years thanks to Pres Clinton.
When the incredibly smart lawyers on Wall St are able to write contracts for execs that pretty much guarantee 10M bonuses that come with such an ironclad lock that even felonies will not disgorge that money, why are you people so afraid of the boogeyman? Madoff transfers “his” property to his wife and then says you can’t can’t touch her money and the $100/hr judge says OK, where is the Big Brother? Not in NYC.
Big Brother is in Singapore and Honk Kong with “true” free market. Super low taxes, lax regulations, no protests. What is not to love? Heck Singapore has some simple tax rules such as home tax benefits only for married people, not for single playboy investors. Not going to have too many foreclosures with those kind of rules.
BTW, whose labor contracts were just rewritten? Ford line workers signed on to pay cuts, even if by force; something that most of us would not have believed would ever have happened.
