On "Regulation"
Nov. 23rd, 2008 12:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsOne of the things that pissed me off most about the current administration is that it repeatedly and regularly described regulation as inhibition of the market and deliberately conflated it with communitarian impulses. To be pro-regulatory was to be anti-market.
In the opaque and unregulated middle-tier market of hedge funds and financial instruments, the interests of stockholders and those whose debt instruments were put into play were secondary to those of market managers, who let the system run wild as long as it benefitted them. No less a lassez-faire libertarian than Alan Greenspan has testified before Congress that this was the primary problem. The market system become so complex that it got away from our human ability to understand it and rein it in. It had too large a headaround. At some point, we were no longer making money with the system; instead, fund managers were taking money out of a system no one understood or could understand. The post-mortem is showing us just how the enconopocalypse ran on the ecology called "the market," but somehow evolved such that it no longer served the human beings who make up that ecology.
Regulation is not always "just" a drag on economies. The night watchman state, the only purpose of which is to prevent loss and extract justice among soveriegn citizens due to violence or deception-- the kind of state Grover Norquist says he wanted-- requires market regulation of a kind that guarantees uniform acquiescence to rules of transparency and comprehensibility. That is the regulatory responsibility that our most recent administration failed to take seriously, and was one reason-- and the only reason I would have needed, really-- why I washed my hands of them and their legacy in the last election.
In the opaque and unregulated middle-tier market of hedge funds and financial instruments, the interests of stockholders and those whose debt instruments were put into play were secondary to those of market managers, who let the system run wild as long as it benefitted them. No less a lassez-faire libertarian than Alan Greenspan has testified before Congress that this was the primary problem. The market system become so complex that it got away from our human ability to understand it and rein it in. It had too large a headaround. At some point, we were no longer making money with the system; instead, fund managers were taking money out of a system no one understood or could understand. The post-mortem is showing us just how the enconopocalypse ran on the ecology called "the market," but somehow evolved such that it no longer served the human beings who make up that ecology.
Regulation is not always "just" a drag on economies. The night watchman state, the only purpose of which is to prevent loss and extract justice among soveriegn citizens due to violence or deception-- the kind of state Grover Norquist says he wanted-- requires market regulation of a kind that guarantees uniform acquiescence to rules of transparency and comprehensibility. That is the regulatory responsibility that our most recent administration failed to take seriously, and was one reason-- and the only reason I would have needed, really-- why I washed my hands of them and their legacy in the last election.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-11-23 08:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-23 09:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-23 11:41 pm (UTC)