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

To: Katelew who wrote (102080)	1/26/2009 9:42:42 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 543060

Laissez-faire, is more a description of how government deals with economic activity on a whole (meaning very minimal regulation, largely staying out of the way, and not subsidizing, regulating, or otherwise intervening more than a minimal extent beyond things like outlawing fraud, and maintaining a system to settle disputes). But absent that, and even in a situation where generally regulation and intervention is increasing, you can have a specific regulation that's removed or weakened that can cause problems. If you want to argue that the problem is primarily caused by such removal or weakening it might be best to just point out the mistake in regulatory easing and condemn it. And in this case there is one specific case of regulatory easing, an easing of some reserve requirements allowing some companies to be more leveraged, that seems to be relevant. I think it stretches credibility to think that its all because of that one regulatory change, but the change did play a roll and not a good one. Arguably the role was an important one. It wasn't "laissez-faire", or even a general deregulation, but it is something you can blame on the Bush administration, and not on the "big government" side of the administration.