[vegancap]

The premise of this article is entirely wrong. We haven't had a 'massive deregulation', taxes across the west have rose, as has regulation and centralisation. THAT is why conditions for workers have declined. THAT is why the rich have gotten richer and the poor have gotten poorer.

[chipotle_coyote]

Reagan and Clinton both presided over massive deregulation efforts across wide ranges of industry, and there is very obvious correlation between those efforts and the economic changes in the last 30 years. The widening of the gap between rich and poor maps very closely with tax reduction policies that disproportionately help the wealthiest and industry deregulation, particularly of the finance industry. The housing crisis of 2008 would not have happened under the regulatory regime of 1988.

And no, correlation is not causation. (The housing crisis of 2008 was not caused by deregulation, and there's a lot of blame to be shared across the political spectrum.) But it's hard not to notice over the long term that when the crazy leftists predict X will happen after a given massive act of deregulation and the sane rational libertarians predict Y, for the last thirty years we've almost always gotten X. And the libertarian response is always, "It's because you just didn't deregulate enough." Well, yes, that's one possible conclusion...

[mindcrime]

Yeah, there may have been some limited de-regulation here and there, but we are no where near an actual free-market situation. For somebody to come along and decry de-regulation as the problem, in this environment, is absolutely absurd.

[jjoonathan]

Just because we aren't near a given unprecedented extreme doesn't mean that we can't talk about the effects of movement in that direction.

[mindcrime]

But we aren't moving in the direction of less regulation. Take a step back and look at the big picture and it's obvious. The size and scope of the State, and the amount of red-tape and regulation, is pretty much always growing in general.

What all these anti free-market people are missing (intentionally or not) is that it makes no sense to watch the State create 20000 pages of regulations, and then yell "de-regulation" when they remove 7 of those pages. Especially when 4 years later they turn around and add another 3377292751 pages of regulation and the cycle repeats itself.

[jjoonathan]

> Take a step back and look at the big picture and it's obvious.

If you think that it's obvious, you clearly don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about.

> it makes no sense to watch the State create 20000 pages of regulations, and then yell "de-regulation" when they remove 7 of those pages.

It makes no sense to use number of pages as a proxy for regulation (either for or against). You measure regulation by watching the big players exploit loopholes. The market allows all sorts of well-known varieties of cheating by default. Are the well-known traditional types of cheating still being used effectively?

http://chartingfinancials.wordpress.com/2012/04/27/us-bank-m...

Yep. Therefore they lack appropriate regulations. That's what we mean when we say "deregulation." We don't mean "the number of pages on the law books is decreasing, clearly we must increase it because more pages are better." That's a straw man, and you do everyone (yourself included) a disservice by invoking it.

[vegancap]

Exactly! I've read a lot of posts recently claiming the 'free-market' is the problem. Well, I can't think of many countries in the world who have a currency not owned by the state, a banking system entirely independent of the state, a country with a real, none-fiat currency, a country with minimum to no forms of tax etc. It just isn't the case, and it's not heading that way by and means either. I'm not sure where people are getting this from

[bryanlarsen]

One can simultaneously have a relatively free market in thumbnails and combs and a relatively closed market in currency and assassinations.

[mindcrime]

Exactly! I've read a lot of posts recently claiming the 'free-market' is the problem.

Yeah, it's a symptom of the kind of elitism that modern day "leftish wing" / "liberal" types (as opposed to classical liberals) are infected with, where they believe that if only we'd let them micro-manage every little detail of society, the economy, culture, etc., then we could live in a "perfect" world where everyone is uniformly happ and "none suffer".

The thing is, that's never been possible and I don't think it'll ever be possible... and if it were possible, it's not desirable. "Uniformly happy" also means "uniformly sad" and "uniformly oppressed". None for me, thanks.

[vegancap]

Perfectly put! I got down-voted to -6 karma for challenging that attitude, good to see someone who agrees at last.

What baffles me the most if when they refer to what we have now, in the west as a 'free-market'. What we have is the end product of the social-democrat era of conflating big business and big government.