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.”

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.

“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?

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.

…and vote EARLY & OFTEN I suspect…

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!”)