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Honestly, I'm not sure what point you are trying to get at from reading your comment, its all disjointed without a clear overarching point. If you're trying to
by than3 4y ago
Honestly, I'm not sure what point you are trying to get at from reading your comment, its all disjointed without a clear overarching point.
If you're trying to say that regulators should be able to go and work for the people they were regulating, that shows a significant lack of understanding about how corruption has worked in actuality.
The reason many countries have blackout periods where regulators are forbidden from receiving any kind of funding from the people they were regulating afterwards is because when its allowed, corruption occurs, and the cost to prosecute it is almost always high. The more centralized and heavily regulated the area is, the more prevalent it is, and worse the enforcement arm becomes less effective at a general cost to the public (look at the SEC).
There are a number of legal ways that bribes and payoffs may happen without blackout periods (i.e. where they can't accept a position with any company doing business in areas they oversaw), and while a number of these loopholes have been closed, there are still many avenues where sophisticated bad actors can easily get around law intended to punish corruptive behavior such as with blind trusts set up for education, where there is only one beneficiary but its set up as a lottery.
Corruption should be rooted out, and heavily punished because it causes harm to the public good, its insidious and pernicious in regulated areas.
- fwlr 4y agoI’m trying to say that a journalist set out to make a banker look like a corrupt hypocrite, the banker made the journalist look like a fool instead, and then the newspaper committed a hilarious act of mild betrayal by publishing it.
- ashwagary 4y ago>the banker made the journalist look like a fool instead, Certain readers would takeaway that he deflected where a person of integrity and good faith would use the opportunity to steelman and address the core conflict of interest criticism put forth.
- fwlr 4y agoSure, I’m not trying to prescribe the reader’s takeaway here.
- credit_guy 4y agoJust so we're clear, Barney Frank was a congressman, not a regulator.
- pdonis 4y agoAs a congressman, he sponsored a highly significant law that governs all of the activities of regulators. So if anything, the conflict of interest question is more relevant to him than it would be to a bureacrat working in one of the regulatory agencies.
- credit_guy 4y agoI disagree. Once a law is passed, it's the law. It applies to everyone, including the congressman who authored it. Regulators however are the people who enforce the laws. Having a regulator in your pocket is many times more useful than having a lawmaker in your pocket. For example, if a cop pulls you over for a traffic violation, would you rather have the chief of police among your "good friends", or the lawmaker who passed whatever traffic law you violated?
- pdonis 4y ago> if a cop pulls you over for a traffic violation, would you rather have the chief of police among your "good friends", or the lawmaker who passed whatever traffic law you violated? If I get pulled over by a cop for a traffic violation, it means my attempts at major corruption have already failed. The minor corruption of having the chief of police fix my ticket is small potatoes by comparison. If I want to buy laws and regulations that favor me over my competitors, which is a much more serious form of corruption (and the form that large organizations like banks are much more likely to engage in), I want to buy the lawmaker, not the regulator, because the lawmaker will give me much better value for my money.