OK there are hundreds upon hundreds of laws and relevant cases, and you can't name one to back up your blanket statement. It doesn't take an expert to know what you disagree with. I have not posted any pro or anti regulations arguments. I agree our regulations were ineffective. The rescission is a clear indicator of that. What i have a problem with is blanket statements blaming corporate greed, fraud, and injustice on government regulations.
The question of creditability i have is with blanket statements, which you refuse to or can not back up.
I couldn't care less whether I sound credible or not to you. And if you really cared about the substance of what I said, rather than simply passing some irrelevant judgment about me, you'd do the research yourself. Like I said, Lexis Nexis is a good resource. That's about as much as you'll get from me. Good luck.
Well, one example would be that many taxes levied upon both private companies and corporations operate on a flat rate. That is, they do not scale according to the net worth of the business. This is obviously advantageous for the larger corporations since the same tax that is a drop in the bucket for them can be something sizable for a struggling private business owner. We both agree that regulations have been passed in a supposed effort to control giant corporations from doing unethical things. We also agree that these regulations haven't worked. The possible reasons these regulations haven't worked aren't many. Either they have found a loophole in the regulations "supposed" to limit them or the regulations weren't truly designed to limit them in the first place. To me the only likely possibility is the second.
Agreed. I don't believe that politics and economics can be so simply explained by happenstance and coincidence due to ignorant politicians and the greedy businessmen that manipulate their good will. Rather, every policy is implemented by very clever politicians and businessmen working in tangent to achieve an intended goal that is in fact what that implementation of that policy results in. In other words, what they create and accomplish is intended to be created and accomplished. If they say otherwise, it's because the intended result was not in the public's best interest (as it rarely is), and they want you to really believe that it was unforeseen and unintentional.
Yeah, this notion that politicians are incompetent needs to go. They sure are competent at fucking us over. Nobody wants to believe that when politicians act not in the best interest of the people that they do so out of malice, so the incompetency meme is adopted.
this thread is like a bunch of fascists complaining about themselves i'll add to the list though: anti-communism - check
I think you may have missed TONS of other options by trying to reduce "Why regulations don't work" to an either-or choice (this is, incidentally, a common logical fallacy: False Dichotomy). I'll give you a recent example of an alternative: incompetent enforcement by NON-POLITICIANS. The New York Times recently found that clean water laws are routinely violated by companies across the country, not for lack of laws but for lack of enforcement (you can read the story here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/us/13water.html?_r=1&ref=us). To give you the cliff's notes version, the people who are responsible for enforcing clean water laws are not elected. They are also not appointed. Much like employees of the DMV, or most other government bureaucracies, they work there for life and keep their jobs regardless of who gets elected. Here's probably the most pertinent quote: In my opinion, it's probably the "ability" that they lack the most. This is a MAJOR problem in America. In most other developed part of the world (France and Japan in particular come to mind), people receive a great deal of respect if that hold a bureaucratic government job. In America, people who hold the same jobs are derided. Worse, unlike other countries, in America they probably are not the "best and the brightest". I'll give you a quick example of why. I had two friends in college, one of whom was a physics major, the other a biology major, both had very good GPAs (way better than mine) and excelled at keeping large equations in their heads, something that made them good at their respective majors. Either one would have been a great match for a state or federal regulator that needed to test pollutants, engineering standards, etc. Instead both ended up working for Goldman-Sachs, because Goldman-Sachs ALSO wanted people who could hold large equations in their head. The difference was that Goldman-Sachs could also pay them $140,000/yr their first year out of college. The EPA could only pay MAYBE $44,000. It was a "no-brainer" for them. (Note, this was in 2005, I know that financial jobs are, ahem, harder to come by today) So the US ends up with regulators staffed by the less-best, less-bright, who are underpaid, and derided by the public. Does that sound like a recipe for success?
Isn't incompetent enforcement a loophole waiting to be exploited? It's very possible that I'm missing some possibilities that didn't fall under my terms, but I don't think this is an example of one. This marks the end of the semantics section. I'm really not sure what point you are making here... I was originally arguing that if the intentions were truly good, 100 years seems like more than enough time to close up these incompetency loopholes. It's not like the government isn't growing in proportional size and scope to anything in the private sector. Just maybe they are using their increased size and scope not to regulate unfair business practices, but instead regulate you and I.
That's kinda the same point though. We believe big corp works with big govt entirely for big corps benefit alone. One of those benefits is getting the educated elite to work for them, instead of going into govt or other job functions. Similarly, the incompetence of enforcement is partially due to the lack of practical and efficient planning by those that created the regulations, and in effect, the enforcement branch. That would be politicians. We just happen to believe that it isn't a lack of knowledge, analytical thinking, or competence on the politicians part that causes these issues, but rather these 'issues' are intended to occur, because somewhere along the line, the existence of this 'issue' benefits someone, and it almost always is big corp. Rather than admit they aren't working in the public best interest, politicians feign ignorance and blame lack of practical foresight for the 'unintended' adverse consequences. It gets worse the more 'noble' the cause is too. So while law enforcement, who are government employees, are nothing to the standard that we would expect them to be in 'the best country on earth', they are far better than the social workers, admins, and bureaucrats that work within the lowest levels of social welfare programs. I'd be fine with the coincidence excuse if this is some sort of new revelation and they were working to alleviate or totally fix it, but the fact is, this has existed for decades, they aren't working to fix it, and more often than not they don't even have to resort to the 'coincidence' or 'unforeseen consequence' excuse because they pretend things aren't like that. They create reality and write history by controlling the media. Our argument isn't against regulations, its against govt policies that are purported to be regulatory, and instead end up showing clear favoritism towards big corp.
The point I was trying to make is simply that the government cannot match the public sector is terms of ability to hire the "most able". This leads to incompetent enforcement. Someone at one of the top investment banks between 2000 and 2007 could be paid $140,000/yr starting their first year out of college. The EPA will never be able to match that. The government simply CANNOT match that. And it's across the board. In California, law students can easily make over $100,000/yr their first year out of law school. The Justice Department, on the other hand, usually can't pay more than $60,000/yr to people the first year their hire them, and can only break $100,000 after a decade of service. The government will never be able to hire those with the greatest abilities, because they will always be able to make significantly more money in the private sector. This isn't a "loophole" it's just the facts. To use an extreme example, Goldman Sachs' 30,000 employees are being paid an AVERAGE of $700,000 this year (source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/12/business/12change.html?em). For the US government to pay the same AVERAGE salary as Goldman Sachs, it would cost more than $1.3 trillion (1.9 million civil service * $700,000) a year. That is about equal to the totals for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid COMBINED for 2010 (WallStats - Death and Taxes & Taxes). At present, there is simply no way the government could ever come up with the money necessary to match the kind of salaries that are available in the private sector. As such, those who have the ability to make more money in the private sector will work there, and the government will be stuck with whomever is left.
Point taken. But how competent do you really have to be to enforce the regulations? If the positions of the employees were reversed, would the trend still continue? Methinks it would. Tis speculation though.
They accomplish this not explicitly, but indirectly rather, by creating a craptastic public school system that has no consistency in quality, the difference being quite significant from high income to low income school districts. This way you end up with an elite few who are smart enough to go to the good colleges. Everyone else goes to crap colleges, trade schools, or enter the work force. To employ this huge chunk of the population that is incompetent and uneducated, they creating a shitload of useless administrative, bureaucratic, and security jobs. The private sector can only create so many useless jobs, and this is where government jobs come into play. If you have incompetent people enforcing regulations that are supposed to keep corp in line, and corp usually step out of line because of loss of profit or high costs, then it is in corps interest for those enforcing the regulation to be incompetent. So they lobby to politicians, bribe, and do all the nasty shit necessary that never even gets reported on, and basically influence govt to help create exactly the scenario I just described.
You can learn a the same amount in any university library, it doesn't have to be Harvard. To scape goat "all the nasty shit" on incompetent people, specifically is sounded like poor people, would ignore several reasons for corruption.
As you said, corruption exists, and what I'm saying is that a deliberate, intended result of this corruption is to create a group of incompetent 'poor' (if you want to call most of the middle class poor too) people. It is those in power that are responsible for setting the example to everyone else, so if there is corruption at top, its bound to trickle down and it thrives when it gets all the way down to the very bottom. The more corruption up top, the more that makes its way, to the bottom. The more people that benefit from this corruption, the more it'll thrive and spread. That's why it exists at the very top and very bottom, because more people in both of these groups mutually benefit from corruption, and usually the corruption in the bottom can be easily traced to the corruption up top. And it's not about how much you know, or learn when it comes to getting hired in corporate America. It's about what you majored in, who gave you that degree, and who you know in the industry.
Poor doesn't equal incompetent, and it is everyone's responsibility to be a good person regardless of what examples you have in life. The sooner you stop blaming anyone but yourself for your problems, the sooner your problems will go away.
What dude, did you even read what I wrote. I said 'poor' because you used the word poor when you mentioned incompetent people. And I clearly stated that your implication that I meant 'poor' could only be true if by that you meant most of the middle class too. Reading comprehension ftw. The soon you stop apologizing for you govt and industry, the sooner it can be improved so that it benefits everyone.