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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (102074)	1/26/2009 9:25:26 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 543059

Your definition of "laissez-faire" can never exist and can never be tested. Perhaps "laissez-faire" is something that will never exist. But true or not, its rather irrelevant. "Laissez-faire" has an actual meaning, and it doesn't mean "a regulation was loosened" (capital requirements for certain types of firms), or "no significant new regulations where passed to cover this new development" (great expansion of credit default swaps). Even if "laissez-faire" is a fantasy, like a unicorn, why use the word incorrectly. Whether its possible or not, we didn't have "laissez-faire". You might as reasonably blame our economic problems on unicorns. After all unicorns at least have never existed and have never been "tested", which fits with your opinion of the status of "laissez-faire" and which judging by your post seems to mean they can be arbitrarily redefined to mean anything in any situation. What makes it even more bizarre is that you have had all sorts of expensive new regulations of economic and financial activity under Bush, most notable being Sarbanes-Oxley. Economic and financial regulation has increased under Bush. Some of it was bad regulation. Some of it may have regulated the wrong areas. Some of it may have regulated the right areas but not go far enough, or even get loosened in a few circumstances. Whether or not it "didn't go far enough", regulation did increase overall. So you didn't even have a move in the direction of laissez-faire. And we've never, in modern times, had a very strong overall move in that direction in the US.