On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 8:36 PM, John Williams <[email protected]>wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 7:53 PM, Doug Pensinger<[email protected]> wrote: > > > How ironic is it that someone who claims to be such a libertarian is > > so adamant about restricting my rhetorical style! > > When did I claim to be a libertarian? Oh, come on. You espouse libertarian ideologies constantly, Mr. Keep the Government out of Everything, Please. Catch "60 Minutes" tonight, talking about how deregulation in financial markets in 2000 essentially legalized betting on financial instruments, which had been illegal for most of the 20th century? That's what opened the doors to credit default swaps and other credit derivatives... the modern equivalent of Wall Street's "bucket shops," which I hadn't known about until I heard this. What was a felony suddenly became legal, at the behest of Wall Street, and it was justified by the very arguments you make here - government regulation, intervention is bad, leave the market alone, they're all grown-ups and the market will fix any problems that come up. And look what happened instead - wild betting on mortgages, so confusing and byzantine that nobody knows what any of it really is worth. And this is a good? This federal deregulation actually stopped the states from enforcing anti-gambling and anti-bucket shop laws, passed after the crash of '07, in the financial markets. You'd think that would have been a strong clue that this would go badly. Now we know. Yet some still insist that we should not regulate these things. Oy. Nick
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