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If there's even a debate about having a law, it's because there's a real or perceived failure by the market to do the right thing. In this case, it'd be becaus
by jbooth 16y ago
If there's even a debate about having a law, it's because there's a real or perceived failure by the market to do the right thing. In this case, it'd be because Goldman's activities have nothing to do with the proper role of finance and everything to do with exploiting the already existing bugs in the market system.
Nobody's saying that the government should write laws regarding toilet paper manufacturing, for example. There's a difference between "make a working complex system even more complex", and "attempt to fix a completely broken system, with full knowledge that your fix won't be perfect either".
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- jerf 16y agoIn general, you can not actually fix bugs by encrusting more code onto your system. At some point the buggy code has to come out. It is not true to say governments never cancel laws, but they sure don't do it anywhere near often enough. This isn't really free market vs. regulation, a debate I think cuts in the entirely wrong direction anyhow, it's simply a system engineering question. Complexity begets more complexity. Simple solutions to real world problems actually beget complexity too, but less so. People in general need to be able to ascertain whether a given action they may take is legal or not in advance of being hauled into court and having a judge decide, and complex laws remove that. Legal complexity eventually becomes its own tyranny all by itself. (And if you do want to play "free market vs. regulation", I would challenge you with: "exploiting the already existing bugs in the market system." or "exploiting the already existing bugs in the regulation of the market system"?)