Outside North-Korea and Cuba you will perhaps not find one single advocate of the centralized plan-economy. In the rest of the world the majority of people will probably not deny the superior status of the market regarding the fulfilment of needs of the people. But in recent history we have seen that the market can have devastating effects if left on its own. The present financial crisis may well have been prevented if the housing market and the financial market had better been regulated. So, the question is not regulation or no regulation?, but which regulation is absolutely necessary and which regulation is superfluous or detrimental? There are no easy answers, but these have to be found in a proces of trial and error and we ca learn alot of history in this respect.
A sector which is very critical for regulation is the building sector. Each year the technical universities in the Netherlands deliver hundreds of architects. With the almost complete implosion of the building-market, to choose for the occupation of architect gives an almost 100 % guarantee for joblessness. And in many coutries the situation may not be very different. In the past years scores of office-buildings have been built based on perverse financial stimuluses and are now waiting for decay. A still better guarantee for a jobless career is supplied by the study of cultural anthropology. The fresh anthropologist who manages to find a job in anthropology is realy a lucky dog. And you may well put the question of some restriction of the entrance to this kind of studies would not be sensible and would prevent a lot of human disappointment and broken careers and save a lot of societal capital. Walther Micke -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
