3 ms·

Additional checks end up biting you in the back. I think what he said was that additional checks have a cost that must be weighed against the benefits. Funny,

by neilk 18y ago

Additional checks end up biting you in the back. I think what he said was that additional checks have a cost that must be weighed against the benefits. Funny, you are the one who is touting himself as able to handle complexity. And yet in this debate you can only perceive black and white. If communism is bad, that means that ALL regulation is bad! And if some people need extra help or training to deal with credit, that means that they're SHEEP who will be the wards of the state forever! I am sad that nobody has taken up the point that I was trying to make; that we all need some help from time to time. Hackers have an easy time bouncing back from rotten luck, illness, or poor life choices; things that would cause other people to eventually amass an unsustainable debt.

Tichy 18y ago
I am all for helping people. I am just not sure who could be trusted - I don't necessarily trust the government to make the best choices for the people. And in this crisis, there is too much scapegoating going on for my taste. And calling for regulations seems to be an extension of that. If you call for regulations, first tell me why the market failed to regulate itself (that is weed out the crooks, if the crooks are to blame)? If you are calling for more transparency, maybe I can go with you. But I don't think complex rulesets about who should give credit and who should be allowed to get credit are the way to go forward. I don't want to claim to understand what pg wrote, but my understanding would be he wrote among other things about something exactly like that: more regulations means it becomes more costly to give somebody credit. Therefore there will be less firms giving credit, and "smaller people" will have more problems getting credit because they are not worth the bother. In the end there will be a monopoly of a few big firms who handle credit. Also, what if housing prices really would have risen forever, and regulations would have prevented people from gaining from it? Who is to say in advance what course of action is right? Or would you say everybody who took out a mortgage was a crook?
- GavinB 18y ago
  I thought PG's article was pretty spot on. He wanted regulatory actions to be viewed in the broader context with an understanding of the net drag of all the regulations. If we could convince elected officials to do this sort of analysis, we might be able to weed out a lot of the unnecessary inefficiencies. That said, the solution to an overabundance of regulations is not necessarily to utterly eliminate them, and the lack of perfection should never be an excuse for not performing an action when the consequences of inaction are worse. I won't pretend to know what should or shouldn't have happened in the current financial crisis. My post was really directed more toward basic consumer protections -- things like truth in advertising, not selling rotten meat, being upfront about the terms of payday loans, etc.

by neilk 18y ago

Tichy 18y ago

I am all for helping people. I am just not sure who could be trusted - I don't necessarily trust the government to make the best choices for the people. And in this crisis, there is too much scapegoating going on for my taste. And calling for regulations seems to be an extension of that. If you call for regulations, first tell me why the market failed to regulate itself (that is weed out the crooks, if the crooks are to blame)? If you are calling for more transparency, maybe I can go with you. But I don't think complex rulesets about who should give credit and who should be allowed to get credit are the way to go forward. I don't want to claim to understand what pg wrote, but my understanding would be he wrote among other things about something exactly like that: more regulations means it becomes more costly to give somebody credit. Therefore there will be less firms giving credit, and "smaller people" will have more problems getting credit because they are not worth the bother. In the end there will be a monopoly of a few big firms who handle credit. Also, what if housing prices really would have risen forever, and regulations would have prevented people from gaining from it? Who is to say in advance what course of action is right? Or would you say everybody who took out a mortgage was a crook?

GavinB 18y ago
I thought PG's article was pretty spot on. He wanted regulatory actions to be viewed in the broader context with an understanding of the net drag of all the regulations. If we could convince elected officials to do this sort of analysis, we might be able to weed out a lot of the unnecessary inefficiencies. That said, the solution to an overabundance of regulations is not necessarily to utterly eliminate them, and the lack of perfection should never be an excuse for not performing an action when the consequences of inaction are worse. I won't pretend to know what should or shouldn't have happened in the current financial crisis. My post was really directed more toward basic consumer protections -- things like truth in advertising, not selling rotten meat, being upfront about the terms of payday loans, etc.