To paraphrase Churchill: It has been said that free-market capitalism is the worst economic model except all the others that have been tried.
You use the word "deregulation", yet thousands of pages of new regulations are churned out each year by the Federal government... when 1 or 2 pages are repealed, we hear "They're deregulating!". Any look at the regulations being emitted from the Federal Government will numerically prove that deregulation isn't our problem.
It seems more apparent to me that the problem is that the Government has created really poor regulations and way too many of them at that. They created the regulatory mix that their corporate partners wanted them to in order to protect the business models of those corporate partners.
Maybe if the Government tried to do a lot less and just did what it does well, we could keep better track of it and hold it accountable? Instead, the trend seems to be to hand over more power and authority to the Government in hopes that the people in it are somehow more ethical and wiser than the citizenry. That hope would seem to have been misplaced.
With deregulation I don't mean the lack of regulatory laws. It's not about the quantity here, it's about the QUALITY of the regulatory framework.
What good are thousands of pages of "regulatory" law when they are filled with loop holes? In fact these monstrous laws are perfect for the big corporations, their lobbyists and lawyers. These people live for this. Heck, they even often write the laws themselves!
Have a look at the deregulation of California's energy system. These are not small laws. However, this is an example of clear deregulation, and was not a regulatory effort.
In fact Enron was able to pull off completely immoral, but often at many times legal, shenanigans. I mean they shut down half of the power plants because their energy traders could make a profit from the rising prices. Holy shit. In the mean time they cried wolf and said that regulation was killing them. BULL SHIT. It was the exact opposite.
People actually died from these power outages. Again, holy shit.
With big so-called regulatory and "deregulatory" frameworks filled with loop holes, small business owners are basically shut out of the market because they don't have the resources necessary to even begin to understand the matter.
In the mean time, big corporations can fully exploit these custom-made laws, profit from them and then later, call for "more deregulation".
I hope you do realize that this is a vicious cycle.
I guess what I don't understand is your connection between "Free Market Capitalism is a joke" and the true statements above. A bunch of companies writing laws isn't Capitalism. It's Cronyism and Corporatism.
It's a direct result of investing too much power in the government to control things since there are no real protections to keep the government from being corrupted by anyone with some money.
It's one thing to have a powerful corporation that dominates a marketplace. That can make it uncomfortable when you're looking for an alternative product or service. It's quite another thing when powerful corporations write the laws. In that case, we're screwed since the guys with the tanks no longer allow us any choices but to fall in line.
To paraphrase Churchill: It has been said that free-market capitalism is the worst economic model except all the others that have been tried.
You use the word "deregulation", yet thousands of pages of new regulations are churned out each year by the Federal government... when 1 or 2 pages are repealed, we hear "They're deregulating!". Any look at the regulations being emitted from the Federal Government will numerically prove that deregulation isn't our problem.
It seems more apparent to me that the problem is that the Government has created really poor regulations and way too many of them at that. They created the regulatory mix that their corporate partners wanted them to in order to protect the business models of those corporate partners.
Maybe if the Government tried to do a lot less and just did what it does well, we could keep better track of it and hold it accountable? Instead, the trend seems to be to hand over more power and authority to the Government in hopes that the people in it are somehow more ethical and wiser than the citizenry. That hope would seem to have been misplaced.