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OTOH, a policy of frank disclosure does not always tend to increase public confidence in government.
OTOH, a policy of frank disclosure does not always tend to increase public confidence in government.
Or the civic bona fides of the regulated firms.
This pretty well encapsulates the story line, but...
there is a lot of money in the hands of folks who don't want to be regulated, and, subsequent to the Supreme Court ruling overturning McCain-Feingold, lots and lots of that money is being funneled to the folks who run on the "too much regulation ruined our economy" folks.
If there was such a thing as effective regulation it might be different, but what got passed in the name of finance reform (and health care reform, too) was such a "see we can pass things" move, as to be essentially useless to their intended purpose or to the benefit of the American public.
Government can't even regulate itself.
Perhaps!! at one time, Americans had a sense of civic responsibility and good-faith participation in democracy, a sense that we're all in the same boat. United We Stand. Maybe in the 40s, 50s, and 60s when taxes were much higher, the financial sector's inevitable crimes were pre-empted by enforced regulaiton, and Real American economy and general wealth were growing.
But with the examples of the unpunished crimes and fraud by the financial sector, by the war-profiteering MIC, by the low taxes paid by the super-wealthy, by the unpunished dubya/ head criminal Reign of Error, by the total paralysis and corruption in DC, etc, etc, you have to be one stupid, naive sucker to play by rules.
Last edited by boutons_deux; 11-08-2010 at 12:58 PM.
So because you have difficulty keeping your house clean, you throw the keys to the kids and leave for an extended vacation and let them do as they please?
The spoiled brat kids do have the keys and the Federal Reserve does as it pleases.
That's bs. There are plenty of instances of effective regulation. They're just not sexy topics that attract a lot of attention (which probably explains why they're effective).
I've never seen, for example, anyone complain that Sarbanes-Oxley is ineffective, costs taxpayers boat-loads of money, etc... And I haven't heard of much accounting fraud going on lately either.
What's troubling to me isn't the lack of oversight per se as much as it is the willingness to remove the market strictures that would nominally provide disincentives against bad conduct.
An effective counter to the urge to do whatever one damned well pleases (both individually and organizationally) is the possibility that economic consequences might arise from bad conduct. But our society has chosen, by and large, to both deregulate and engage in substantial anti-tort legislation that largely insulates bad actors from facing the true consequences of their bad acts. Even those reforms that purport to only cap damages have a tendency to provide something akin to immunity because: (a) other legal reforms make proving cases exceedingly difficult; and (b) the caps themselves make prosecution of actions that require exceedingly specific proof impractical for both the injured parties and those who might represent them.
The substantial legislative preference for corporations over individuals has left little need to comply with what de minimis regulations persist -- as BP demonstrated, a corporate actor can engage in the rankest sort of negligence and wreak havoc on lives while subjecting itself to an economic consequence that is a fraction of a fraction of its lifeblood.
As I heard someone put it recently, in relative terms, the legal consequences for a teenager who steals a television are, frequently, far greater than the consequences for a corporation whose negligence kills one of its own employees.
No, the point is that those looking for government to solve problems will be disappointed. One of many reasons we need a smaller federal government. Not bigger.
Big government is the problem. Not the solution.
Well, actually I did hear a lot of moaning about the costs of complying with the Sarbane-Oxley law, at least when it first went in. But there will always be crying, and I frankly don't care about the whiners.
If it is effective, GREAT! If it does not meet its intended purpose, however, and has lots of 'unintended consequences', then it is not good regulation.
I am TOTALLY in favor of regulating the financial ins utions in this country. I wish that the financial reform act that was passed would have included the Volcker rule. But it didn't, and it amounts to not EVEN a slap on the wrist to the people who took down our economy (to whit, the financiers, not the dems or repubs). That didn't stop Wall street from moaning loudly, as though they had really been hurt, though.
Big government is the only force that can regulate the forces that have brought us all down. That they have thus-far failed to regulate in our favor or protect us doesn't mean there is some extra-governmental solution that would do better. Unless, of course, you have a better solution.
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