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**feeshyLew** · 12-20-2011, 02:10 AM

I'm cutting back on the length a bit here for consumption purposes. Cause and effect are key components of any example and a very interesting subject for analysis. Yes, we did de-regulate post World War II and a lot of it was simply because they regulated nearly every facet of our lives and livelihoods (did you want steak for dinner? too bad, due to rationing there is none available today!) Then a bunch of others got tacked on, maybe less strict on occasion but certainly sufficient to dillute the pool and make individual regulations less effective. Another way to ask the question is why did prosperity last so long under a de-regulated state before 2008? (of course there were hiccups, we don't need to delve down that path.) I take chicken-egg arguments specifically with a grain of salt because frankly they're far too misleading due to the bias of the analyst skewing facts in a manner to support their position. Sometimes it comes down to a simple question of whether good and bad things happen as a result of government or despite it.

I agree that finding exact causes can be speculative in many respects - in regards to your question - was our "prosperity" particularly long lived? Economic growth slowed almost immediately after derregulation began - the hyper-growth that happened in Asia never saw the light of day in the US. De-regulation and tax cuts really took off with Reagan, and American wages have been almost completely stagnant since then. Bush pushed through another round of massive tax cuts, and the Recession started before he even left office.

Now perhaps one could argue that these are unrelated to the deterioration of our economy, but this long lived prosperity you speak of simply didn't happen.

I have no problem with a model that allows a rich person to get very rich fundamentally, if we value their KSA's in a field to the extent we feel their contributions to be worth millions or even billions, so be it. Envy gets a person nowhere, and I see absolutely no point in bringing those individuals down if they acquired that venerated status honestly through their professions rather than dishonestly through their crony positioning with people who are postitioned to unbalance the system. I'm guessing you would bawk if a congressman got a hundred million dollars when he left office. Why is it any different with a CEO? For that matter, why should a CEO be given a hundred million dollars while hundreds or thousands of employees are being laid off? If you want to talk about "waste and inefficiency" - that certainly fits the criteria. I doubt a CEO is smarter or more qualified than a typical mid-level engineer. It is fortunate that the DoD doesn't follow this model - or General Conway and McCrhystal would have gotten a hundred million dollars when they retired - because they're "smarter" than everyone else in the military.

Again with Europe, we're back on the chicken-egg thing, it's not a well-kept secret that historically the majority of European models have utilized a more socialist system of government, not to mention the fact that they deliberately tied in their currency to one another under an even more flexible fiat variety than even our own. How does that have ANYTHING to do with socialism? All fifty states in the US use the same currency. Is this socialism? What makes the two systems different is we established political unity before a currency unification - they attempted the reverse, to use a unified currency to establish political unity in Europe. This didn't work, and its screwing them. They've tried to set up an equivalent of the Fed to oversee the Euro and set up loans to the relevant parties - so far they've failed, largely because the voters see such an idea as imperialism. The collective identity we take for granted in the USA didn't happen for Europe.

No model, whatever variety will ever be the perfect one. The largest risk towards free markets is not dishonesty, it's not even corruption, it's two things, firstly monopolistic enterprise and secondly oligopolistic enterprise in high demand markets. When the government gets its hands in the cookie jar, the direction always defaults to one of these two scenarios, which is a strong indicator of why many GSE's may feel secure enough to assume increasing levels of risk such as financing subprime lending, especially when de-regulation in the form of alternative regulation is imposed to encourage assuming risk under artificially low interest rate levels. The free market isn't a person, or a group. Its just an environment with people in it. The biggest "threat" in a free market is the prols getting fed up and hanging the rich off lamp posts. While artificial controls are a nuisance to the rich, they keep the rest of the population placated enough to prevent revolution.

There's the pragmatic reality of it - the rich won't do anything about widespread misery until the problem gets big enough for even the rich to get scared. The fall of the czar in Russia scared the living shiat out of aristocracies across the world. So while the Great Depression and the recent Recession didn't hurt the rich, not at all - they actually got richer - the widespread poverty in "the 99%" can lead to wealth redistribution by force. FDR was allowed to push through his new deal in large part because the American elite feared another Communist Revolution. Allowing those pesky poor people to have jobs and food was annoying, but it was better than getting lynched by a mob.

You're right in a sense about revisionist history perspective, it is all hypothetical. But as you indicated it had worked in Britain and this could allow a person to hypothesize whether we had done the right things in a timely fashion to attempt an alternative to war, which it's fair to say that if we had found that alternative we MIGHT have avoided one of the darkest chapters in our own history. True. But a choice was made. The Southern Aristocracy chose to fight, and suffered the consequences. Over 10% of the Federal Army was black - all volunteers - the Southern whites' worst nightmare, the negroes rising up to kill them, had come true. It was time to pay the piper, so to speak.

I would say many things happened in the civil rights era despite our Federal Government intervention, not because of it. I would venture in many cases the government was all too eager to segregate our society, reinforcing the perception that different people of different races were "seperate but equal". By barring our own freedom to associate at the outset the government did far more to deter successful integration of our races than it ever had to "forcibly integrate" us later on, Yes, but remember, that was no accident. The Reconstruction was a very tricky period - segregation was a compromise, the South was still racist to the bone, it was deemed necessary to offer them a system that they could accept - no slavery, but they could still treat blacks like shit. Its not a compromise I agree with, but it was better than slavery. The Democrats, and later on the Republicans, used this racist sentiment to control the Southern white vote.

which by its own premise is problematic, because put simply, it is the right of every person to be discriminatory towards who they associate with, especially privately, regardless of the sensitivities around the issue. In the public sphere the only means a person has to exercise that right is not go to a place where those they do not wish to associate with are going to be, or at least minimize interaction when they do happen to be in a similar location, as both parties have a freedom to be there. That's, at best, a dubious claim. Even if we concede that on a private basis we have a right to discriminate (which I don't) - the government is still involved. White businesses used the sheriff departments and police to enforce segregation. State police were used to suppress black demonstrators and civil disobedience. Federal grants were given to whites-only schools. So no, it was NOT just a matter of personal choice - public money was used to enforce and promote segregaton.

Exactly what I'm proposing is to cut the chaff, there are far too many distractors, complexities, and deterrents in our own government to confound the most critical of observers, much less the layman. We're in a situation right now it is irrelevant how trasnparently our government operates because it becomes a full time job just to work our way through the smoke and mirrors. We have a set of boundaries by which we can define our role of government, and it was laid out very clearly for us. This government at the consent of the governed has turned into a rotted onion and our only recourse is to begin peeling back the layers or dispense with it in its entirety. Yes, but look at our actual economic problems - a broken medical system. High unemployment. Massive outsourcing... NONE of these are solved by de-regulation. Streamlining our regulatory system is an admirable idea, but its really not relevant to the serious dilemas at hand.

12-20-2011, 02:10 AM	#25
feeshyLew Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 445 Senior Member	I'm cutting back on the length a bit here for consumption purposes. Cause and effect are key components of any example and a very interesting subject for analysis. Yes, we did de-regulate post World War II and a lot of it was simply because they regulated nearly every facet of our lives and livelihoods (did you want steak for dinner? too bad, due to rationing there is none available today!) Then a bunch of others got tacked on, maybe less strict on occasion but certainly sufficient to dillute the pool and make individual regulations less effective. Another way to ask the question is why did prosperity last so long under a de-regulated state before 2008? (of course there were hiccups, we don't need to delve down that path.) I take chicken-egg arguments specifically with a grain of salt because frankly they're far too misleading due to the bias of the analyst skewing facts in a manner to support their position. Sometimes it comes down to a simple question of whether good and bad things happen as a result of government or despite it. I agree that finding exact causes can be speculative in many respects - in regards to your question - was our "prosperity" particularly long lived? Economic growth slowed almost immediately after derregulation began - the hyper-growth that happened in Asia never saw the light of day in the US. De-regulation and tax cuts really took off with Reagan, and American wages have been almost completely stagnant since then. Bush pushed through another round of massive tax cuts, and the Recession started before he even left office. Now perhaps one could argue that these are unrelated to the deterioration of our economy, but this long lived prosperity you speak of simply didn't happen. I have no problem with a model that allows a rich person to get very rich fundamentally, if we value their KSA's in a field to the extent we feel their contributions to be worth millions or even billions, so be it. Envy gets a person nowhere, and I see absolutely no point in bringing those individuals down if they acquired that venerated status honestly through their professions rather than dishonestly through their crony positioning with people who are postitioned to unbalance the system. I'm guessing you would bawk if a congressman got a hundred million dollars when he left office. Why is it any different with a CEO? For that matter, why should a CEO be given a hundred million dollars while hundreds or thousands of employees are being laid off? If you want to talk about "waste and inefficiency" - that certainly fits the criteria. I doubt a CEO is smarter or more qualified than a typical mid-level engineer. It is fortunate that the DoD doesn't follow this model - or General Conway and McCrhystal would have gotten a hundred million dollars when they retired - because they're "smarter" than everyone else in the military. Again with Europe, we're back on the chicken-egg thing, it's not a well-kept secret that historically the majority of European models have utilized a more socialist system of government, not to mention the fact that they deliberately tied in their currency to one another under an even more flexible fiat variety than even our own. How does that have ANYTHING to do with socialism? All fifty states in the US use the same currency. Is this socialism? What makes the two systems different is we established political unity before a currency unification - they attempted the reverse, to use a unified currency to establish political unity in Europe. This didn't work, and its screwing them. They've tried to set up an equivalent of the Fed to oversee the Euro and set up loans to the relevant parties - so far they've failed, largely because the voters see such an idea as imperialism. The collective identity we take for granted in the USA didn't happen for Europe. No model, whatever variety will ever be the perfect one. The largest risk towards free markets is not dishonesty, it's not even corruption, it's two things, firstly monopolistic enterprise and secondly oligopolistic enterprise in high demand markets. When the government gets its hands in the cookie jar, the direction always defaults to one of these two scenarios, which is a strong indicator of why many GSE's may feel secure enough to assume increasing levels of risk such as financing subprime lending, especially when de-regulation in the form of alternative regulation is imposed to encourage assuming risk under artificially low interest rate levels. The free market isn't a person, or a group. Its just an environment with people in it. The biggest "threat" in a free market is the prols getting fed up and hanging the rich off lamp posts. While artificial controls are a nuisance to the rich, they keep the rest of the population placated enough to prevent revolution. There's the pragmatic reality of it - the rich won't do anything about widespread misery until the problem gets big enough for even the rich to get scared. The fall of the czar in Russia scared the living shiat out of aristocracies across the world. So while the Great Depression and the recent Recession didn't hurt the rich, not at all - they actually got richer - the widespread poverty in "the 99%" can lead to wealth redistribution by force. FDR was allowed to push through his new deal in large part because the American elite feared another Communist Revolution. Allowing those pesky poor people to have jobs and food was annoying, but it was better than getting lynched by a mob. You're right in a sense about revisionist history perspective, it is all hypothetical. But as you indicated it had worked in Britain and this could allow a person to hypothesize whether we had done the right things in a timely fashion to attempt an alternative to war, which it's fair to say that if we had found that alternative we MIGHT have avoided one of the darkest chapters in our own history. True. But a choice was made. The Southern Aristocracy chose to fight, and suffered the consequences. Over 10% of the Federal Army was black - all volunteers - the Southern whites' worst nightmare, the negroes rising up to kill them, had come true. It was time to pay the piper, so to speak. I would say many things happened in the civil rights era despite our Federal Government intervention, not because of it. I would venture in many cases the government was all too eager to segregate our society, reinforcing the perception that different people of different races were "seperate but equal". By barring our own freedom to associate at the outset the government did far more to deter successful integration of our races than it ever had to "forcibly integrate" us later on, Yes, but remember, that was no accident. The Reconstruction was a very tricky period - segregation was a compromise, the South was still racist to the bone, it was deemed necessary to offer them a system that they could accept - no slavery, but they could still treat blacks like shit. Its not a compromise I agree with, but it was better than slavery. The Democrats, and later on the Republicans, used this racist sentiment to control the Southern white vote. which by its own premise is problematic, because put simply, it is the right of every person to be discriminatory towards who they associate with, especially privately, regardless of the sensitivities around the issue. In the public sphere the only means a person has to exercise that right is not go to a place where those they do not wish to associate with are going to be, or at least minimize interaction when they do happen to be in a similar location, as both parties have a freedom to be there. That's, at best, a dubious claim. Even if we concede that on a private basis we have a right to discriminate (which I don't) - the government is still involved. White businesses used the sheriff departments and police to enforce segregation. State police were used to suppress black demonstrators and civil disobedience. Federal grants were given to whites-only schools. So no, it was NOT just a matter of personal choice - public money was used to enforce and promote segregaton. Exactly what I'm proposing is to cut the chaff, there are far too many distractors, complexities, and deterrents in our own government to confound the most critical of observers, much less the layman. We're in a situation right now it is irrelevant how trasnparently our government operates because it becomes a full time job just to work our way through the smoke and mirrors. We have a set of boundaries by which we can define our role of government, and it was laid out very clearly for us. This government at the consent of the governed has turned into a rotted onion and our only recourse is to begin peeling back the layers or dispense with it in its entirety. Yes, but look at our actual economic problems - a broken medical system. High unemployment. Massive outsourcing... NONE of these are solved by de-regulation. Streamlining our regulatory system is an admirable idea, but its really not relevant to the serious dilemas at hand.
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