Reply #111: That's pretty much true but..

[DaedelusNemo]

When we're arguing which regulations are necessary, it's not enough to simply say 'as few as necessary'. On a lot of things, we have way too much regulation. On some things, we need more, and those may include the bigger problems right now. Indeed, there are some sectors that have become so unregulated as to actually hurt the economic interests of the whole sector - take how the accounting rules were loosened up, for example, helping Enron and others to do what they did, which included blowing a huge crater in investor trust and scaring money out of the market - hurting many of those who had thought loosening the accountability would be swell.

The fact is, our modern system of long-distance investing absolutely depends on trust; it is simply not feasible for individual investors to run around the country trying to verify the public information. To undermine that trust is to undermine the market that rests atop it.

A lot of the deregulation efforts that have taken place have been disasters. We should recognize when there are potentially conflicting interests. Should we privatize all our water, for example? Or do we rather have a priority of ensuring that everyone can get the water they need to live? If so, the only way to ensure that is with regulation. Once things that are a matter for survival for some become strictly a matter of profit for others, injustice rapidly arrives. Witness the California energy debacle.

Many of our very largest corporations don't pay tax, through various gamings of the tax system. That isn't a problem of too much or not enough, it's just a matter of needing different regulations.

There's an awful lot of people working their days in a cloud or a vat of chemical poisons and getting godawful diseases as a result. We need to do a better job with our labor standards. Part of that may well be clearing out a lot of the underbrush and trying to write a more cohesive standard. We should also refuse to import goods produced with less than some minimum standard of labor (wages of course would need to be relative to local economies, but some standards are in fact the right of every human being.) Some of this is just enforcing what law there already is.

We are in general doing far too much to help the largest corporations, whose whole claim to existence is their unparalleled ability to compete economically. If their business models aren't working by now, we need to stop propping them up. They're plenty big enough to fly on their own, especially considering that these efforts are largely at the expense of small businesses - which could actually use a hand-up on their way to successful self-sufficiency.

I think that there is actually a considerable amount of support on Wall Street for sensible regulation, if their periodicals are any indication - articles proclaiming that the profit margins in various sectors are "unhealthily high"!? While some people stand to gain large amounts from a higher defecit, many more businesspeople stand to lose from it. Bush's favoritism is at the point where it excludes much of the traditional financial base of the party. This is not the time for the Democrats to meet him halfway. A starkly different approach is called for. Accountability. I'm all for simplifying regulations and shredding great gobs of them, but accountability must be preserved, along with whatever minimum standards we expect to live with as a country. In the long run, it's the best thing you can do for the economy as well as for the people.