Regulation or Strangulation
November 10th, 2009 by Grandpa OddballCopyright © GetOddNews and Grandpa Oddball November 10, 2009. All rights reserved.
So what are some of the problems with our current regulatory climate? Well, they are legion and range from bad regulations to lack of critical regulations, to poor enforcement to outright corruption. I don’t have room to list them all but here are a few:
-
A very serious problem that I haven’t seen discussed elsewhere is the effect that our current regulatory mess has on competitive competition. This problem is so serious that it can destroy our economic system. Unfortunately it is also so completely ignored that nothing is being done to prevent another crisis and possible economic collapse. The plain fact is that just as our current free trade policies have been perverted, our regulatory system has been perverted to promote monopolies (and monopolistic acting oligarchies). And just like our horrendous free trade policies, our distorted regulations ruins fair competition by allowing corporate mergers to form oligarchies which controls prices (e.g., gas prices) and prevent real competitors from entering the market place by requiring compliance with massive silly regulations, using delaying tactics, and a host of other techniques.
The consequences of this short sighted attitude are economic instability, erosion of our industrial base, unemployment and ultimately poverty. In effect most of us will be forced to a subsistence existence working as virtual slaves for the privileged few in control of the economic system. I’ll discuss how and why this mess was created later but for now think human nature (e.g., greed, power, sex, pride).
- Inspections to insure compliance with good regulations are spotty at best. Relying on the integrity of companies to self police their products has for the most part proven to be a failure. Many of the regulations were enacted in decades past when tainted food or other unsafe product scandals forced congress to do something but over the years these regulations have gradually been weakened or effectively ignored. I don’t know about you but I am getting ticked off that we are allowing poisoned food and lead contaminated products from unregulated countries such as China to be imported without inspections. Just how many episodes of Salmonella or mad cow disease does it take before we’ve had enough? Apparently a lot since little has been done to correct things.
- Probably the most blatant technique to kill off those pesky regulations is to simply ignore them! Thus we have repeated mergers of successful and profitable companies to form monopolistic like oligarchs (e.g., the oil and gas industries) which manipulate the market to gouge us. Where is the enforcement of our anti-trust laws? Gone, a victim to the loss of common sense and the greed of our elected representatives I guess.
- A very useful technique is to influence lawmakers to rescind effective regulations. Thus we have the deregulation of energy debacle from a few years back. With the willing compliance of elected ideologues publicly owned (and paid for with tax dollars) and efficiently run power plants and transmission lines were sold to private companies who then manipulated the energy market to steal from the rest of us. Boy, how stupid and at the time the lawmakers didn’t notice their stupidity! But we are even dumber because we keep electing these bozos.
- Lack of critical regulations continue to plague our economic system. In the last century abuses forced congress to enact laws regulating such items as food safety, corporate fraud, workplace health and safety, stock/bond/commodities markets and so forth. As noted in the previous bullet these essential laws and regulations have over time been weakened or ignored to the detriment of us all. How this happened is that old bugaboo of all idealists human nature. I’ll provide more details later in this post as well as list some consequences but for now suffice it to say this is a serous problem.
Pages:
«« previous page 1 2 3 4 5 6 next page »»
Tags: Economics, free trade, politics
this article with others.
