On Thu, 9 Oct 2008, Harry Pollard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >Ed, > >What has changed since Adam Smith is the introduction of the >controlled economy. > >The US has some 9,000 tariffs and quotas to keep out competition. Does >that sound like Adam Smith? > >Umpteen billions of dollars are given to producers distorting the >market. The agricultural subsidies are a disgrace. > >More billions go to consumers in a variety of ways. > >We have huge bureaucracies at every level of government, wasting > >Direct meddling in the economy by inflating the currency and >artificially depressing interest rates doesn't exactly sound like Adam >Smith. > >Whereas the evidence is clearly seen that big government action is >synonymous with failure.
Well, it seems that the current disaster is the direct result of an absense of sufficient government action (policing of financial institutions). You might prefer to think along with Alan Greenspan that the institutions should be allowed to make their mistakes, and learn from them, so that they will behave better in future. Unfortunatately, institutions don't learn, people do, and the lessons come along sufficiently infrequently that all those that learned the last lesson are gone when the next opportunity for applying the lesson comes along. That's what regulations are for. I somehow think that all those folk who will get to explore the various ways that the economic repercussions of reckless banking behaviour can affect their lives, over the next year or two, would rather the regulatory route had been taken. The collateral damage of the school of hard knocks for the slow learners of high finance is too expensive. A big government bureaucracy is dirt cheap by comparison. -Pete _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
