bostonbubble.com

[mpr]

[mpr]

[GenXer]

Regulation increases the cost of doing business. Consumers pay the price. Laws and regulations which redistribute wealth are neither commonsense nor fair. Even with all of the disclosure, many of the products are extremely risky. The solution is quite simple - let them fail. Don't bail them out. There will always be booms and busts. Contract the money supply when we have a bust. Expand when we have a boom. Regulate the amount of money necessary to buy a house (20% min). Or regulate the credit necessary to purchase something. This is fair and commonsense, and does not discriminate. Maybe the economy will not grow as much as fast, but it will help control crises like this.

[Xenos]

GenXer -- do you see how you decry regulation in one breath and yet propose it in another? We used to have sound underwriting standards, and conservative monetary policy like you suggest. We got away from that, in part out of a desire to broaden the access to mortgages, but mainly because the financial industry lobbied hard for freedom from regulation, using the same free market arguments you have made upthread.


Any regulation necessarily involves redistributing wealth or opportunity. Instead of reciting dogma, the two sides to the debate ought to be working out what exact regulations and policies allowed the recklessness of the last decade, and how they need to be changed to fix this. We can disagree about the relative guilt of Clinton and Bush, but there seems to be broad agreement about the need to return to regulations and business practice of 30 years ago. Except for the people in power in Wall Street and Washington. These people are in both parties.

[GenXer]

As far as economic policy, the only thing that made sense under Bush were the tax cuts. Both parties are guilty of overspending and over-regulation. Any regulation which redistributes wealth is automatically suspect. Why? Because usually the negative side effects can dominate, and nobody can predict what these would be, so, it makes sense NOT to regulate at all (in most cases). I am against all regulation, except the truly common-sense one. This is not dogma - it is the observation that regulation has failed miserably, and more regulation will fail even more miserably (isn't that what some people are arguing? more regulation?). Its laughable at best, and reckless at the worst to suggest that regulating yesterday's products will protect us from tomorrow's inventions. More regulations? The more you bias the field towards the big businesses who pass the costs on to the consumer. I don't see any logic in this. There is nothing to compromise about. But I'm afraid most people can't see the slippery slope towards socialism, where every decision is outsourced to the all knowing, all regulating and all caring government, so we the dumb masses do not have to worry about our welfare when our benevolent and all-encompassing government will regulate our lives to the minute. This is exactly where everything is heading.

[john p]

MPR: You think you're smart because you've learned how to be artful in your sarcasim, and you cower behind it. It is clear that you've spent more of your god given talent in the pursuit of intellectual masturbation of trying to insult others to make you feel better. You get off (most likely aroused) on insulting people. Ask yourself if you feel good about yourself when you insult someone with great craft. If you do, you should talk to a therapist because its not a happy place. A better investment of your time would be to be to try to be a subject matter expert and if someone disagrees you can be helpful instead of insulting.

Your quote:

[Boston ITer]

As I'm reading this thread, there's a dizzying sense of two types of camps, one is the free market of being a self-made person vs that of wealth distribution to cater to a plebiscite.

Now, here's the question, of the concentrated wealth out there, how many are honestly, self-made individuals (ala the family restaurant chain owner, Steve Jobs, Jesse Livermore {the self-made trader}, etc) and how many are those who use cohort effects to retain their sense of wealth accumulation.. the lobbyists, the collusion of bankers (ala Drexel-Burnham), etc?

Then, on the flip side, you have those who simply want a job and earn a decent wages for a day's work. Are they asking for too much like lifelong employment security, etc? So I think the problem is that there's a bit of a divide and conquer going on when discussing the 'govt vs business' where in effect, entrepreneur types are pitted against W-2 employees and vice versa. All and all, throughout this, the elitists in both categories, i.e. robber barons for business types and politicians for W-2ers, seem to do well in the cacophony of the underlings bashing one another.

[Xenos]

[quote="GenXer"]As far as economic policy, the only thing that made sense under Bush were the tax cuts. -- snipping for brevity-- More regulations? The more you bias the field towards the big businesses who pass the costs on to the consumer. I don't see any logic in this. There is nothing to compromise about. But I'm afraid most people can't see the slippery slope towards socialism, where every decision is outsourced to the all knowing, all regulating and all caring government, so we the dumb masses do not have to worry about our welfare when our benevolent and all-encompassing government will regulate our lives to the minute. This is exactly where everything is heading.[/quote]

I can't really argue with your logic here, as there are many links I am just not following. Your background is obviously in economics, and mine is not, but your arguments are marshalled for making political points, but taking your conclusions at face value is just impossible. More regulation vs. less regulation -- that is the binary choice we must make? How about different, as in, more regulation where needed, and dropping the regulation that is outmoded? And what regulation would you drop as unnecessary? Since your post lamented the loss of the old underwriting standards, does not mandating a return to those standards mean increasing regulation?

This is what I mean by 'dogma' -- regulation=bad and free market=good and Obama=Socialism and Bush=Fascism is not logic or argument, it is a catechism. We have a mixed economy, partly free market and partly socialistic. We have a dynamic balance between the two, with major political parties offering policy changes trending one way or the other for the public to choose from. This is how the game is played. Don't be so pissy about it.

[GenXer]

I'm having a field day today...thank you guys for the entertainment - I think we all need a bit of that.

[Boston ITer]

[Xenos]

As a lefty I have been more than pissy over the last eight years, so I should be one to talk, anyway.

Good luck as an entrepreneur. As the African saying goes, a successful man is like a well where everybody goes to drink.

[balor123]

[balor123]

[samz]

[Boston ITer]