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

To: JohnM who wrote (131781)	2/28/2010 11:38:09 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541370

Regulation hardly converts private to public. Yes, I made that point several times. Regulation is the tool used by government to constrain private industry. If an industry is nationalized, that is, converted to public, then regulation is not in play. If you nationalized the banks, then they would no longer be regulated. They would operate off of internal policy, instead. Regulation by government implies the the regulated entity is non-governmental. The notion of regulation not only doesn't convert private to public, it becomes meaningless after conversion. Banking regulations were much tighter than they are now. It was a reasonably private industry then. The food industry is reasonably private but it's regulated, thank heavens. The drug industry, ditto. Banking, food, and drugs are regulated industries. More or less regulation does not make them more or less private. That they are regulated is indication that they are private.

To: JohnM who wrote (131781)	3/1/2010 1:43:30 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 541370

The food industry is reasonably private but it's regulated, thank heavens. There are food safety regulations, plus all the normal regulations that apply to any large business (workplace safety, minimum wage, ADA, financial reporting requirements, etc.) But they are (at least mostly) free to decide what type of food to sell (in other words design their own products), what hours to be open, what prices to charge, who to sell to (where to open stores, kicking out unruly customers, etc.) and so on. It seems that perhaps that the health insurance corporations in the exchanges will not have this freedom. They won't be able to deny or significantly add to the charges for those with pre-existing conditions. They won't be able to design their own products (at least not completely, there might be a small range of differences, but the rules are mostly set by the government), set their own prices, select their customers etc. That's why she sees them as operating more like contractors doing federally contracted work than as companies operating in the private sector. I don't know that there is any simple bright line where government control where the private sector starts to serve "government purposes" rather than picking their own, but obviously making these important business decisions is an important part of that transition. At some point increased regulation starts to make the nominally private enterprise more and more a creature of the government. Its not the fact that the ownership is private that produces the benefits of the operation of the free market (private actors are not inherently more efficient or otherwise superior to government actors), its freedom to make business decisions, combined with competition.