Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I am of the view that the government needs to get OUT of the private sector. There is far too much regualtion of the private sector and it is killing our economy and smothering jobs. And it is not just the Federal Government but I would say state and local governments are even worse offenders than the Federal is.
The ONLY regulations that should be enforced with a vengence are laws requring FULL DISCLOSURE in PLAIN ENGLISH for contracts and enforcement of the Sherman Anti Trust Act. If we did just these few things, we could rid ourselves of thousands of other useless expensive regulations and foster a new era of true competition in the country.
Let's take a look at a case going on right now which is the imminent AT&T take over of T-Mobile. I am opposed to that. I think that the FCC and DOJ should both say NO to that and make it clear that the anti trust laws will be used to make sure that healthy competition exist in the phone business and that 1 or 2 big companies are not going to be allowed to squash or buy out all their competition.
On the other hand, I can understand AT&T and T-Mobile's frustration when it takes them 5 years to get a permit to put up a tower to provide the services that we demand they provide. My view is that, if a cellular company comes to a PRIVATE property owner and wants to lease or purchase land to install a tower, the government should STAY OUT of that. That is a PRIVATE contract between the land owner and the cell company that is really nobody else's business. Why should a PRIVATE contract be subjected to government review? The only government function, if any, is to make sure the tower is safe and built to accepted standards and that it has adequate insurance to repair any damage or injury it causes should it fall onto neighboring property.
If the government would act more this way, our economy would grow on healthy business competition. I think that government feeds on itself with regulation. It makes it impossible for business to effectively compete and then, when a business fails, government uses that to stretch its regulatory hands even more into the private sector.
When the government passed TARP and bailed out all the banks, GM and AIG, just such a thing happened. It violated the rule of free enterprise and did not allow the normal failure and liquidation of these institutions as it should have. The result is now we have mega "too big to fail" banks and of course more government regulation with Dodd-Frank. If we had allowed BOA, Chase and GM to fail, we would have smaller banks competing for the business and no need to regulate anymore because competition would have taken care of the problem.
I am of the view that the government needs to get OUT of the private sector. There is far too much regualtion of the private sector and it is killing our economy and smothering jobs. And it is not just the Federal Government but I would say state and local governments are even worse offenders than the Federal is.
The ONLY regulations that should be enforced with a vengence are laws requring FULL DISCLOSURE in PLAIN ENGLISH for contracts and enforcement of the Sherman Anti Trust Act. If we did just these few things, we could rid ourselves of thousands of other useless expensive regulations and foster a new era of true competition in the country.
Let's take a look at a case going on right now which is the imminent AT&T take over of T-Mobile. I am opposed to that. I think that the FCC and DOJ should both say NO to that and make it clear that the anti trust laws will be used to make sure that healthy competition exist in the phone business and that 1 or 2 big companies are not going to be allowed to squash or buy out all their competition.
On the other hand, I can understand AT&T and T-Mobile's frustration when it takes them 5 years to get a permit to put up a tower to provide the services that we demand they provide. My view is that, if a cellular company comes to a PRIVATE property owner and wants to lease or purchase land to install a tower, the government should STAY OUT of that. That is a PRIVATE contract between the land owner and the cell company that is really nobody else's business. Why should a PRIVATE contract be subjected to government review? The only government function, if any, is to make sure the tower is safe and built to accepted standards and that it has adequate insurance to repair any damage or injury it causes should it fall onto neighboring property.
If the government would act more this way, our economy would grow on healthy business competition. I think that government feeds on itself with regulation. It makes it impossible for business to effectively compete and then, when a business fails, government uses that to stretch its regulatory hands even more into the private sector.
When the government passed TARP and bailed out all the banks, GM and AIG, just such a thing happened. It violated the rule of free enterprise and did not allow the normal failure and liquidation of these institutions as it should have. The result is now we have mega "too big to fail" banks and of course more government regulation with Dodd-Frank. If we had allowed BOA, Chase and GM to fail, we would have smaller banks competing for the business and no need to regulate anymore because competition would have taken care of the problem.
You nailed it; I agree with everything you said!
"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys."
Yes! We should get rid of all regulatory power that the government has!
-People love monopolies, they cuddle customers with price gouging.
-We don't need clean air or water, those chemicals are "nutritious".
-Certainly don't need licensing of medical professionals, any schizophrenic in a lab coat could do it for cheaper.
-Certainly don't need regulations or to know what's in our food, China does great without it.
-Don't need regulations on oil drilling, all that oil in the gulf is extra flavor the fishers can benefit from.
-Don't need regulations on banking, bank crises made society better for everyone.
Yes! We should get rid of all regulatory power that the government has!
-People love monopolies, they cuddle customers with price gouging.
-We don't need clean air or water, those chemicals are "nutritious".
-Certainly don't need licensing of medical professionals, any schizophrenic in a lab coat could do it for cheaper.
-Certainly don't need regulations or to know what's in our food, China does great without it.
-Don't need regulations on oil drilling, all that oil in the gulf is extra flavor the fishers can benefit from.
-Don't need regulations on banking, bank crises made society better for everyone.
We already have all those things compliments of our US goverment
Yes! We should get rid of all regulatory power that the government has!
-People love monopolies, they cuddle customers with price gouging.
-We don't need clean air or water, those chemicals are "nutritious".
-Certainly don't need licensing of medical professionals, any schizophrenic in a lab coat could do it for cheaper.
-Certainly don't need regulations or to know what's in our food, China does great without it.
-Don't need regulations on oil drilling, all that oil in the gulf is extra flavor the fishers can benefit from.
-Don't need regulations on banking, bank crises made society better for everyone.
ROFL..we have all those things today WITH FedGov regulation.
Who do you think you're kidding?
Yes! We should get rid of all regulatory power that the government has!
-People love monopolies, they cuddle customers with price gouging.
-We don't need clean air or water, those chemicals are "nutritious".
-Certainly don't need licensing of medical professionals, any schizophrenic in a lab coat could do it for cheaper.
-Certainly don't need regulations or to know what's in our food, China does great without it.
-Don't need regulations on oil drilling, all that oil in the gulf is extra flavor the fishers can benefit from.
-Don't need regulations on banking, bank crises made society better for everyone.
typical idiocy liberal thinking. us conservatives complain about too much government regulation, and the libs try to suggest that we want no government regulation, and that is far from the truth. the reality is that we do in fact have too much regulation, and it needs to be substantially cut back. for instance, if glass-steagal had not been gutted in the 90s, and had the clinton administration not pushed for more relaxed rules for fannie and freddie, we would not be in the situation we are in now. glass-steagel worked quite nicely for more than 60 years.
as for other regulations, stupid stuff like the EPA requiring farmers to control dust. that is as stupid as a regulation in new zealand that would have forced ranchers there to pay a tax on their cows methane production, essentially eliminating cattle ranching in new zealand.
too much regulation is just as bad as not enough regulation. we need to balance regulations with what is good for business.
Yes! We should get rid of all regulatory power that the government has!
-People love monopolies, they cuddle customers with price gouging.
-We don't need clean air or water, those chemicals are "nutritious".
-Certainly don't need licensing of medical professionals, any schizophrenic in a lab coat could do it for cheaper.
-Certainly don't need regulations or to know what's in our food, China does great without it.
-Don't need regulations on oil drilling, all that oil in the gulf is extra flavor the fishers can benefit from.
-Don't need regulations on banking, bank crises made society better for everyone.
As I just stated we need MORE enforcement of anti trust which will insure that competition takes care of the rest so LESS regulation will be required elsewhere. Because if those companies over charge, provide poor service or attempt to cheat, the consumer in a competitive private sector economy, can simply take our business elsewhere. If I don't like Verizon, I can choose from AT&T, T Mobile, Metro PCS, Sprint or Cricket. That is what should serve as "regulation" in a private economy.
Obviously where health and safety of the public is involved, regulation is quite appropritae as long as it is to protect the safety and health of the population such as clean air and safe water. It is not appropriate to kill millions of jobs for a snail or owl. Therefore the government's powers should be limited to that.
As for government licensing, I do not see it as necessary. Private enterprise does a very effective job of certification and polices itself quite well. If you want to be a doctor, fine by me, Put your sign out. But if you are not board certified by the AMA, you may not use the term MD and don't expect to see me in your office for my annual physical. And your required malpractice premiums are probably going to be quite high if you can even find a company to sell you the coverage. Same with lawyers. Anybody who wants to be a lawyer should be able to practice law but if you are not an ABA lawyer, you have to reveal that you are not ABA certified to any potential client.
Regulation on oil drilling is not needed either. The only thing that should be required of drillers is that they carry a multi billion dollar liability insurance policy or deposit such amount into a private interest bearing fund to cover any losses caused by your drilling activity. That is self reguation because the drilling company certainly does not want billion dollar losses from accidents. They have a private sector built in incentive to be safe.
Same with banking. If banks make stupid reckless decisions, they will fail. Let them fail and the ones left will be more careful and not do stupid stuff like give 100% financing for homes for people with bad credit who cannot afford them. The private sector works well if you allow it. It rings out the sloppy, inefficient and stupid very effectively.
The private sector is far more effective at punishing wrong doers than the government ever has been.
Vegas Joe:"...The ONLY regulations that should be enforced with a vengence are laws ..... enforcement of the Sherman Anti Trust Act.
Let's take a look at a case going on right now which is the imminent AT&T take over of T-Mobile. I am opposed to that.
I think that the FCC and DOJ should both say NO to that and make it clear that the anti trust laws will be used to make sure that healthy competition exist in the phone business and that 1 or 2 big companies are not going to be allowed to squash or buy out all their competition."
In my opinion, you are targeting the wrong monopoly. You are targeting the one that one that is one or two steps removed, at a higher layer, rather than getting to the root monopoly which is what causes (for example, in this case) these telecom companies to get as big as they do in the first place such that they even have the leverage to be taking over other companies.
Because you target the wrong monopoly, you thus fertilize the business ground in such a way that you are allowing a monopoly situation to even germinate. You have to poison the ground, so to speak, so that business never can even begin to get in that position to begin with. The "poisoning of the ground," so to speak, is done through a [radical] restructuring of property rights (the fine pointed details of that to be perhaps discussed in another future thread).
And with regard to the aforementioned property rights change, the problem in the telecom example you gave, lies in how the way governments regulate spectrum. The distorted way we chose to allow spectrum allotment is just an extension of Benjamin Tuckers monopoly over resource examples... only at the time when Tucker wrote his treatises, radio transmission and the use of the electromagnetic spectrum as a "resource" was pretty much unknown, so he did not deal with that issue, but substantively, the problem is the same as it is with the land, IP, and other monopolies.
If you target the right monopoly, it does away with the need for silly (and unjust) "anti-trust" regulations. The unjustness of the situation is not that one company who has peacefully competed can obliterate smaller companies, but rather lies in the fact that certain deeply embedded aspects of property rights theory have allowed the companies to gain a competitive advantage due to the skewed way in which we have allowed certain property rights theory to evolve. It is because of the very fact that governments worldwide allow certain types of monopolies that big business can get into the position they are in to begin with such that these multi-billion dollar entities that can swallow and capture other billion dollar entities, not to mention all other entities even smaller in size, if they so desired.
A century-plus ago, philosopher Benjamin Tucker tried to explain this.... and his work has been carried on through the twentieth century, but still most people choose not to listen to what the root causes of the problem are because we (and by "we" I mean this applies to people and governments worldwide) have all grown accustomed to a certain property rights paradigm which at one point went greatly askew (e.g. governments worldwide have completely bastardized John Lockes property rights theory, for example... and then that one example still doesn't even touch the other monopoly issue raised by people like Tucker, etc...), and in doing so has allowed companies to grow to the leviathan sized entities that they are today.
It is the property rights paradigm that went askew that is the cause of the problem, not a lack of anti-trust regulations. The anti-trust regulations become unnecessary when you fix the property rights issues, because in doing so, you immediately render all of these companies incapable of doing that which the current system has allowed them to become the monstrous behemoths they have for the better part of a century, which subsequently causes the leverage problem where they can crush the competition.
Anti-Trust regulations are simply yet another example of a poorly thought out Band-Aid approach that does not correct the problem. All it does is "patch" a problem which is still allowed to exist in perpetuity, in a misguided attempt to "manage" the problem. It's akin to instead of curing an aggressive case of cancer, the doctor simply lops off the malignant tumors from time to time... but never really killing in... and it just keeps growing back, and so the doctor just keeps trimming pieces off to keep it at bay.
The property rights system is what went askew in several different areas... that is the cancer (and no, I don't mean "property" is the problem).... Unless you fix that, properly, once and for all... you never really fix the problem, because those areas where it went askew is the problem. By refusing to fix it, we simply let the businesses to keep on getting into the position they find themselves in as leviathan sized entities that have astounding degrees of leverage, and then we misguidedly think we are doing some kind of justice by lopping off pieces of these big companies in an attempt to cut down the size of these leviathans (e.g. by preventing mergers, etc...). You have to correct the property rights deficiencies once and for all so that these companies can never get into that position to begin with. Failure to fix the problem in the manner I described is to lend moral imprimatur to the problem, and support of anti-trust regulations really just becomes a form of lip service where the person feigns concern over the issue. If we truly wanted to fix the issue, we'd strike at the very root and nip it in the bud once and for all.
Last edited by FreedomThroughAnarchism; 08-21-2011 at 05:08 PM..
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
