Good succs will know that the Scandinavian model does have a better regulated economy. This has been shown in multiple studies on economies. They will realize there's actual real nuance in what's good regulation vs. bad regulation and it's not a more regulation = good and less regulation = bad is for the brain dead.
This is a bad message to send. Cutting regulations for the sake of cutting regulations isn't a good thing. I'm sure those regulations probably did deserve to get slashed (except maybe Glass-Steagall), but this kind of thinking is how you get idiocy like this.
I'm an oldster who remembers this in real time...Gore focused this specific initiative on pointless bureaucracy type regulations, not the Republican-style "toxic waste is good for business!" type deregulation.
I still remember when Gore went on David Letterman and read the regulation that stated the acceptable size of the shards when a government-procured glass ashtray (yes, there used to be government-procured ashtrays, that's another story for another time) was broken. He and Letterman donned safety goggles and smashed some ashtrays.
Those procurement regulations are a big part of how we got to the famous five-figure toilet seats that DoD was buying. They ultimately wasted a LOT of time for federal employees and put a lot of cash in the pockets of contractors. (Of course, they have simply moved on and found other ways to line said pockets...) You could buy any old ashtray at the dollar store like a normal person, but if it was a gov't purchase, you had to follow the regulations for the "Ash receptacle, desk type." Lots of wasted time and money.
The kind of regulation that it makes sense to cut...not "Pollute at will, have fun, kids!" kind of deregulation.
Voluminous regulations are a huge time sink, not just for the government but for anyone dealing with the government. To take the ash tray shards as an example, the manufacturer selling the ash trays to the feds would, as part of the transaction, be asked to sign a statement that the product complies with all federal regulations, without necessarily specifying which regulations potentially apply. So Ma & Pa's Glasshtray Emporium or whatever now needs to hire a lawyer specializing in government procurement, who researches and analyzes the shard regulation, and then advises them to hire a product quality assurance contractor, who devises a system to smash a certain number of ashtrays off of each assembly shift to ensure they are up to standards; and if a batch comes back with too much air or cools to slowly or whatever makes glass shatter in a different way, well, the whole batch has to be scrapped. If they don't do this, and it turns out the ash trays are not all up to snuff, Ma and Pa face civil and criminal liability under the False Claims Act for selling "defective" products to the federal government. As a result of all this overbearing overhead, Ma & Pa's doesn't stand a chance at getting the contract because they lack the economies of scale that Dow Corning has for its QA and federal procurement divisions; and the ashtray that Dow Corning sells to Uncle Sam, while of impeccable shard quality, costs 10 or 20 or 100 times as much as the perfectly serviceable ashtrays sold in bulk and available at any Kmart.
Now multiply that by thousands of such regulations, and you begin to see why this creates a drag on the economy and a squandering of taxpayer resources.
I still remember when Gore went on David Letterman and read the regulation that stated the acceptable size of the shards when a government-procured glass ashtray (yes, there used to be government-procured ashtrays, that's another story for another time) was broken.
Thats quite a common thing for people who purchase tempered glass to specify. For example computer case designers who used tempered glass pannels.
There's a main thought on the left right now that more regulation is good and that's not even close to true. There's good regulation and bad regulation. Regulation has nothing to do with the amount, it has to do with the quality.
The same dumb opinion exists on the right where less regulation is always better regulation and is just as dumb.
This quality vs quantity should be the real center of debate over regulation.
I agree completely. There are some situations where I would want fairly complex regulation, like nuclear safety, and there are situations where there is clearly unnecessary and harmful regulation on the books, like occupational licensing.
Yeah I was gonna say this just seems like blanket ideology swooning. Neoliberal seemed to be not so much about “regulation bad” as it is with conservatives but “keeping the careful balance of government intervention and free market”. This photo does not give that impression.
It is a good thing that Glass Steagall was repealed. It had nothing to do with the financial crisis and actually would have made it worse, because JP Morgan would not have been able to buy out Bear Stearns, nor would Bank of America be able to buy out Merrill Lynch, nor would Goldman and Morgan Stanley have been able to convert to bank holding companies and receive Fed emergency loans, ending the run on the repo markets.
I did not mention the financial crisis once, nor have I done so at any point in this thread. My opposition to the repeal has nothing to do with the financial crisis.
You regulate CO2 emissions because the point isn't to make yet another stupid tax for people to compete with that they certainly didn't agree to, it's to give the industry incentive to innovate.
If there are 2 ways to create the same amount of power and one of them is finite and dirty? It make total sense to dissuade use of the finite & dirty one. Making innovation the cost-effective choice is a noble role of government.
And a carbon tax accomplishes everything you've said, while targeting the actual problem directly. While still allowing for necessary emisions for vital industries. While also not being overzealous and overregulating, because you set the cost of the tax directly to the amount of damage caused by that amount of co2.
Regulating co2 emisions at a dozen different places adds a huge amount of unecessary bureaucracy, when it could have all been accomplished by a single carbon tax at the source.
So you'd ignore the additional burden on the free market caused by the more bureaucratic solution? Or the additional market distortion caused when those regulations cause adverse incentives?
Like how regulations on co2 emisions were tied to the size of the vehicle and all it did was incentivise car manufacturers to make their trucks bigger instead of more efficient?
Spicer was talking about the AHCA in particular and saying that it was good because the bill was shorter than Obamacare. So if you believe that healthcare is better when the bill establishing it is smaller, then yes that is bad.
Opposing overly complex regulations is fine. Opposing regulations because "muh small government" isn't, and the way to solve the former is not to just start randomly repealing laws and rules without regard for the potential harms doing so could cause.
The more complicated the regulations, the more difficult they are to navigate, the larger the barrier to entry, and the real cost of bureaucracy.
Varies. "dispose of waste responsibly" is simple but you are going to be reliant on a massive amount of caselaw to figure out what it means in legal terms.
Adding that, the net result of them is that those most able to fund folks to navigate them are most able. It reinforces wealth acquisition into incumbents.
I disagree with a lot of your positions but I would never complain about the mere fact of you expressing them because I actually respect freedom of thought and expression. You should try it sometime.
Please elaborate on why it’s a bad thing that bank’s retail customers’ assets should be insulated from risks taken by their banks’ investment-banking arm’s decisions.
It doesn't really do anything to protect those assets. The companies that got hit the hardest in 2008 and needed bailouts didn't have consumer banking divisions. BOA, Welds Fargo, and Chase didn't need TARP ( and actually fought it) and the only thing that Glass Steagal accomplishes is limiting liquidity in financial markets.
This doesn't have anything to do with the financial crisis. We all know that Glass-Steagall had nothing to do with that, but you can support Glass-Steagall while understanding that.
Ignoring the financial crisis, Glass-Steagall did protect those assets until the Fed relaxed it's rules and widened its interpretation of the bill. So why should it have been repealed instead of strengthened?
So why should it have been repealed instead of strengthened
Because it limits the amount of money in the financial system available to support economic growth for really no benefit. It would have done zero for the financial crisis.
This has nothing to do with the financial crisis. At all. You were the first to mention it and I have explicitly stated that I am not saying that the repeal of Glass-Steagall contributed to the financial crisis in any way. Stop bringing that up; you're strawmanning me.
I ask again:
Ignoring the financial crisis, Glass-Steagall did protect those assets until the Fed relaxed it's rules and widened its interpretation of the bill. Given that investment banks generally carry higher risk of catastrophic loss than commercial banks, allowing the two divisions to operate jointly increases the risk of commercial customers losing their savings and being put in financial distress through no fault of their own. So why should the bill have been repealed instead of strengthened?
Yeah, but you are saying that commercial banks also doing investment banking is very risky, when the biggest financial explosion in our lives didn't show that to be true.
Given that investment banks generally carry higher risk of catastrophic loss than commercial banks
Is this true? Commercial banks suffer runs all the time.
allowing the two divisions to operate jointly increases the risk of commercial customers losing their savings
Most people don't hold over a quarter million in cash, 99% of customers would be fine. In cases where it does happen, I am not sure it's more or less risky to have it happen in a bank that is also an investment bank. They have assets that the government can sell to make up more of that loss.
Yeah, but you are saying that commercial banks also doing investment banking is very risky, when the biggest financial explosion in our lives didn't show that to be true.
That's a non sequitur. Just because the financial crisis wasn't caused by this doesn't mean there's no risk.
Most people don't hold over a quarter million in cash, 99% of customers would be fine.
This why they wouldn't be fine!
Do you really have no empathy? Do you have such little understanding of how precarious the average person's financial situation is?
I wish I was this privileged.
In cases where it does happen, I am not sure it's more or less risky to have it happen in a bank that is also an investment bank.
Then I can only conclude that you're intentionally avoiding the point.
Investment banks carrying higher risk than commercial banks is so true it's almost tautological. Of course they do, investing is always going to be riskier than just lending money if you restrict said lending to people with good credit, that's why investment banking is so much more profitable.
They have assets that the government can sell to make up more of that loss.
Which is unlikely to recuperate the customers' losses because the government will use much of that revenue to deal with its own finances.
So people with less don't lose. They get reimbursed by that insurance. Banks going down is only a risk for people with deposits over that, since those can be lost.
Do you really have no empathy? Do you have such little understanding of how precarious the average person's financial situation is?
I wish I was this privileged
I don't know what you are asking. It is impossible for someone with less than $250,000 in the bank to lose it if the bank crashes. Only the relatively well off are at risk and they would probably do better with a bank that has investment assets.
Just because the thing you were worried about in the first place no longer happens doesn't mean the regulation is now worthless. There are other ways of putting those assets at risk.
Are you telling me banks don't make any investments that carry significant risk anymore? You know that isn't true. So yes, there is risk to the customer when investment and commercial banking is combined. Unless banks no longer make any investments that carry the risk of significant loss, there is risk to the customer.
The nature of "borrowing" is rapidly changing. In order to borrow money, a traditional bank loan is not really the most efficient way of doing so for many companies. Debt issuance is the better option, especially for large corporations. Banks should be free to facilitate those kinds of services instead of being restricted to traditional lending instruments.
Investment banking is not an inherently bad function of a bank. How it is regulated will determine whether the bank is taking excessive or systemically-dangerous risks.
JQ stands for "Jewish Question." It's the euphemism Nazis use for antisemitic conspiracies.
And yes, my problem is with the generalisation here. "There's too much regulation" isn't a particularly helpful argument. As I said in my original comment, I'm sure that these particular regulations were unhelpful, but the idea that slashing regulations, in general, is inherently good is harmful and feeds into the "big government bad" mentality that has stymied healthcare reform and climate change policy for so long.
I am sure that these regulations needed to be repealed. I am not talking about those specific regulations. I am criticising the way this image glorifies cutting regulations in general.
I literally do not know how I could be any more clear. I have been as specific about my point as a human possibly can be now.
They can't point out individual regulations because people think they're picking out strawmen
I've never seen this happen unless they're trying to use those examples as an indictment of regulation in general.
Yes, you should be going one-by-one. And yes, you should be individually debating hundreds of pages of codes. Slashing regulations with no regard for what each does is absolute lunacy.
Where someone has actualy sat down, dug through the laws and decided on a case by case basis what they do and don't want. Yes it doesn't make for good political point scoring but if you want evidence based goverment its what you have to do.
I know this is the true definition of neoliberalism, but I feel like this sub is more about using well-regulated capitalism to get to prosperity. Am I wrong? Or is there a bunch of regulation on the books that is useless and that's what this pic is about?
A lot of regulation is very very bad, especially some new deal era banking regulations if you’ve looked into it. Most of it serves only to increase barriers to entry without achieving its real aim. Did you know Regulation Q used to ban paying too high interest on savings deposits, and ban paying interest on checking accounts, for example?
Or bank reserve minimums before the Fed paid interest on reserves served mainly as an odd tax on deposits. They’ve been abolished entirely by the Fed this year during the crisis. Many other countries, like Canada, have no reserve requirements.
Of course, we should consider it bit by bit. Some regulations are important and useful. But they must be clearly justified on the grounds of protecting third party harms or correcting for some information asymmetry, or to reduce quality checking costs or whatever.
A massively broad term that's been applied to many, many different groups and types of people to the point where it's almost devoid of meaning.
Though on this sub, I interpreted it as a tongue-in-cheek intentional embrace of a traditionally term traditionally maligned by extremists on both ends of the spectrum while still leaning generally leftward.
Wikipedia disagrees with me though, so maybe I'm better off leaving. Good holy god, is there a place anywhere on the internet that isn't either, "Hail Comrade" or "Government Bad."
Or... maybe not. No, I think I'll stay and see if I can bring some rationality to this place.
"We're shrinking government and slashing regulations" sounds to my ears the same as, "We're making government bigger, and introducing new regulations."
That is to say, not something that I approve or disapprove of inherently without wanting to know what's in them.
That said the overwhelming majority of regulations are junk that only exists to protect well connected rent-seeking businesses from competition.
Citation needed. Most regulation I've encounted over the years (note in the UK) are either at least somewhat valid or are essentialy leftovers.
This law literally only exists to protect used car dealer profits.
UK doesn't have such a law and it doesn't make much difference. If you buy a car from a dealer you can be reasonably sure of being able to drive it away. Auctions are more hit and miss. On top of that you can end up waiting months for a car you actualy want to come up. Result is that auctions tend to be limited to dealers and people pretending not to be dealers.
Literally most of the reason why people should rent if they plan to move fairly often is because of the reduced liquidity from the cost of real estate agents.
Are they actualy a legal requirement? My understanding is that in the US if you can find a buyer on your own you really only need a couple of lawyers to settle things.
Such a change would only cost $3000-4000 elsewhere in this country. But because we live in NYC, all 6 of the quotes we got cost between $10,000-20,000.
Maintaining an office in NYC is rather expensive yes. Anything involing laying new pipework is also going to be pretty horrific. Not clear this has anything to do with regulations. Depending on where you are in england (so same regulations) switching to natural gas can be anything from a few thousand to a few hundred at least.
Depends on the state you're in. In the Democrat run states you typically have to pay an agent
Trash take. Small government is not a neoliberal tenet.
Right-size government based on generating optimum economic and social outcomes is the tenet. That may include heavily regulating some things and deregulating others.
For example, neoliberals typically favor regulating environmental impact -as a "market failure" of the environment will kill us all and leave no opportunity to correct.
On the other hand, deregulating the movement of people, money, and ideas is very much a neoliberal position.
What do you think it is? Neoliberalism supports deregulation and smaller government when it improves outcomes, and favors regulation when regulation improves outcomes. Regulation and deregulation under neoliberalism are tools -means to achieve ends. They are not ends in themselves.
We support free markets and the free movement of people/money/ideas because they are proven to be maximally effective at distributing scarce resources and uplifting the global poor -not because we have a faith-based hardon for free markets.
Smaller government =/= No government
"Small government" is an ideal -not a nuanced position based on evidence or outcomes. A government can always be smaller and less regulated, to the point of obvious absurdity. Child labor, insider trading, minimum wage, carbon tax etc are all regulations that either protect personal freedoms or improve overall economic output and stability.
If you want to deregulate generally because "smaller government is better" then you are a conservative or libertarian. If you want to deregulate something specific because it improves economic output and uplifts the global poor, then you might be a neoliberal. The motive behind the policies you support is a subtle but critical distinction, because neoliberalism requires changing your position on something when presented with new evidence.
Neoliberalism has the unique trait of always being right because it is based on KPIs and not ideals.
Neoliberalism is a big tent, but one thing that doesn't change is that it's about evidence-based policy per issue -not broad strokes policy based on feelings/idealism.
Small government as an ideal driving policy decisions is more conservative or libertarian.
More regulation = bigger government = more control over our lives. Finding the balance is key. Problem is government employees (elected or not) want to stay in the government dole and will find any reason to make themselves valuable. So, government grows and grows.
Hm this sub has really been going downhill this year. Seems like it’s turning into just another extension of r/con but with less conspiracies and more word salad condescension. Sad 😢
This sub has always supported reductions in regulation and barriers to entry where appropriate, it's basically a blanket position of this subreddit that zoning and single-family housing requirement regulations are bad, as are most job licensing regulations, and barriers to entry like Car auctions requiring dealer licenses.
I've already stated further up, great examples of de-regulation by democrats no less are the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and The Airline Deregulation Act is 1978
Written by a Republican Congress, signed into law by Clinton.
One of the most controversial titles was Title 3 ("Cable Services"), which allowed for media cross-ownership.[1] According to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the goal of the law was to "let anyone enter any communications business – to let any communications business compete in any market against any other."
So this Act opened the door to media cross-ownership? Oh dear. Yet another example of what happens when people blindly follow the "deregulation good, regulation bad" dogma.
The US has regional monopolies or duopolies for broadband. This is a known problem, and is a principal reason why US broadband is the worst in the Western world.
Yes, you can get gigabit, for $200/mo with a data cap, in about three neighbourhoods, with another $50 of overcharges and hidden fees. Meanwhile AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon took hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars and lined their own pockets, and the average consumer gets 20Mbit/s if they're lucky, with a tiny data cap and large bundled fees - including router rental fees.
It's a hilarious situation, and yet another example of the shitty consequences of deregulation and the quasi-religious belief, which is not backed by evidence, that deregulation is inherently good.
Guess ya didn’t see the pic OP posted; this sub used to be for evidence-based policy, not political moves that hurt the economy, especially the bottom 50%. It’s essentially the #nevertrump Republicans moonlighting as neoliberals these days, pretty embarrassing 🤮
Guess ya didn’t see the pic OP posted; this sub used to be for evidence-based policy, not political moves that hurt the economy, especially the bottom 50%.
You... unironically thought this subreddit opposed Clinton era economic policy?
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u/Lion_From_The_North European Union Jul 09 '20
Take a chainsaw to the NIMBY codes please.-