The following is an answer I posted to an April
3, 2009 Wall
Street Journal opinion piece entitled "
Free-Marketeers Should Welcome Some Regulation.
The best "regulation" would be to let those
institutions and individuals who made the bad decisions fail. What
better teacher than reality? Just take it to a personal level - what
prevents you from throwing away your grocery money instead of exchanging
it for food with the grocer? The knowledge that you bear responsibility
for those actions in the form of the hunger you will feel in the future
when you have nothing to eat. If you happen to spend your money
foolishly one day, would you accept as a rational solution that the
government give you that money back on the condition that a cop (or Mr.
Obama) comes to your house every day to go over your finances and
"regulate" how you should allocate your money? No, you would (I hope)
reject such a solution as an obscene intrusion on your right to live
your life as you see fit. The problem does not fundamentally change when
you multiply your own situation by the number of people and institutions
in the country. Each person has the responsibility and the means to
judge rationally his own needs and balance them with his resources.
There is no fail-safe course of action, and it is especially dangerous
to hand your freedom of action to another party no matter how well
intentioned they are. This country has never had a real free-market, the
current crises was triggered by government loose money policy (among
other things) and as usual the government is proposing a "solution" to a
problem that they caused that will only make the problem worse.
Regardless of who caused the problem there is no such thing as a
"little" regulation. Once you sanction the principle of state control
over the individual you have abrogated the principle of individual
rights and you have a nation of rightless individuals who have turned
over their lives over to a few powerful individuals in Washington - well
if it comes to that, all I can say to my fellow Americans is "Brother
you asked for it!"
