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14 Responses to “Self-Regulate!”

1. Super-Anon Says:
   July 10th, 2009 at 4:43 pm

   And yet in China the government runs the banks, and what are the doing?

   Telling the banks to go nuts making real estate loans just like we did.

   Andy Xie is currently warning about this.

   Regulations are ultimately meaningless if it is the governments that are intent on promoting the easy credit.

2. MikeG Says:
   July 10th, 2009 at 5:54 pm

   And Phil Gramm called for the banning of jelly, which obviously caused the entire problem.

3. Bob A Says:
   July 10th, 2009 at 6:12 pm

   amen… now if only that was Larry Kudlow

4. willid3 Says:
   July 10th, 2009 at 7:16 pm

   seems to work that way every time we try. so far we keep trying it though. with the same result. i seem to recall that was the definition of some psychological problem. just can’t remember what it is

5. willid3 Says:
   July 10th, 2009 at 7:25 pm

   and we have our first bank failure
   http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2009/07/bank-failure-53-bank-of-wyoming.html

6. nemo Says:
   July 10th, 2009 at 9:31 pm

   That psychological problem, I’ve heard it’s insanity, and I’ve heard it’s stupidity. Maybe it’s a little of both.

7. wunsacon Says:
   July 10th, 2009 at 9:51 pm

   Some of us expect too much from our species. Just a few million years ago, we stopped flinging our poo. We haven’t evolved yet to resist junk food, ESPN, unfunded tax cuts, and option ARMs.

   Let’s not fret it though. Cuz our robot masters will be better at all this.

   http://www.scientificblogging.com/news_releases/science_literacy_american_adults_flunk_basic_science_says_survey

   …
   * Only 53% of adults know how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun.
   * Only 59% of adults know that the earliest humans and dinosaurs did not live at the same time.
   * Only 47% of adults can roughly approximate the percent of the Earth’s surface that is covered with water .(*)
   * Only 21% of adults answered all three questions correctly.
   …

   And these people vote!

   (I can imagine a bumper sticker for these folks: “I don’t know s***… AND I VOTE!”)

8. cvienne Says:
   July 10th, 2009 at 10:20 pm

   @wunsacon

   …and vote EARLY & OFTEN I suspect…

9. Douglas Watts Says:
   July 10th, 2009 at 10:26 pm

   We haven’t evolved yet to resist junk food, ESPN, unfunded tax cuts, and option ARMs.

   Which is why we invented laws. Like for murder, theft, fraud. We wouldn’t need a law and penalty prohibiting them if he had evolved past doing them. This is why the “free market” folks seem still lost in a Plasticman comic they read when they were 12.

10. alfred e Says:
    July 10th, 2009 at 11:35 pm

    @wunsacon: Too cool. Too correct.

    “Some of us expect too much from our species. Just a few million years ago, we stopped flinging our poo. ”

    Were you specifically talking about FOX?

11. BG Says:
    July 11th, 2009 at 5:46 am

    Self-Regulation…..Flatulation….What’s the difference?

12. Winston Munn Says:
    July 11th, 2009 at 10:28 am

    It’s not that we expected genuine businesses to regulate themselves – we gave check kiters our account number, unlimited credit access, and AAA bond ratings and then we expected that without supervision we would get a positive return on the investment, pay off the national debt, and and then with the excess profits we could afford to spread American-excesses-loving-democracy-by-military-force inspiration to every oil-rich country in the world.

13. Graphite Says:
    July 12th, 2009 at 4:21 am

    We haven’t evolved yet to resist … unfunded tax cuts

    It’s the unfunded spending we can’t resist. A chicken in every pot and a car in every driveway, all on “some guy making more than me in the next county”? HELL YES, we can!

    Even John Kenneth Galbraith questioned the idea that the periodic inability of business to “regulate” itself meant that we should expect better results from government overseers. The utter failures of the SEC, FDIC, OFHEO, et al show that he was absolutely right, but of course that is a lesson that Barry & Co. insist cannot be drawn from what has happened. After a calamity where both private businesses & government regulators utterly failed in their duties, we are supposed to draw pessimistic conclusions only about the former and not the latter.

14. thales Says:
    July 12th, 2009 at 4:16 pm

    Yes, business self-regulation is toxic. But government regulation is considerably more toxic.

    Business is tricky, and self regulation will fail occasionally. The results are rarely as fatal or permanent as depicted in the cartoon. After the game collapses, the players pick up the remnants of their chips and start a new game. Business failure is a normal part of reallocation of resources in a healthy economy. And the game is voluntary. Nobody ever coerced me to buy into AIG or GM or Countrywide. At least until the government got involved.

    But when the government involves itself, the game becomes involuntary. If I don’t pay my taxes I can go to jail. As a taxpayer, I am involuntarily invested. The government, in all its wisdom and glory, uses my tax dollars to regulate inefficiently and irrationally in a way that is pleasing to politically powerful people. The government’s goal is not prosperity, or efficiency, or justice, but control. When businesses fail, the government uses tax money to subsidize them. The players cannot pick up their chips and start a new game. The government forces them to stay in an ever more decrepit game that needs ever greater subsidies and wastes ever more resources.

    Just as politicians can be counted on to argue eloquently and persistently for ever larger and more powerful government, so can their regulators be counted on to develop ever larger, more complicated, more impenetrable, more unrealistic regulations that will cause ever more inefficiency, waste and failure, requiring, in turn, ever greater subsidies.

    As Ronald Reagan said, “If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. If it quits moving, subsidize it.”