| mrstickball said: A bit of both, although the former would have the most/best effects, as well as the most politically expedient. I'm a broken clock on it, but having mounds of regulations isn't good for our economy. With each additional regulation, more costs are added into hiring employees, as well as increasing compliance costs. When regulations cost companies money, there is a huge problem. As it stands, our tax code costs each business about $3,000 simply in compliance costs. Environmental regulations cost about $10,000 - $12,000 per employee on average. Think about the money that is taken out of the economy for complying with regulations. Reforming regulations to made codes more understandable and easier to deal with is paramount. If a business needs to hire less HR to comply with tax policy, that is good. If a business has to spend less on environmental compliances, because the codes are more streamlined, this is good. As it stands, the Clean Water Act is ~7,000 pages of codes and growing. Reformation is key. In other markets, deregulation is key. I know derivatives is the issue everyone likes to bring up, but a lot of the problems exist not because of deregulation, but a corporate cronyist attitude that allowed deregulation and government incentivization of various businesses. That is, the government pushed for banks to lend to toxic debtors, and the banks jumped at the chance, knowing they'd be playing with house money. That kind of deregulation is wrong. The government is horrible about that. They will regulate and restrict industries in what they do (Democrats, mainly), while the Republicans "Relieve" the corps with tax breaks and subsidies... Neither is right, as they are creating red tape, then compensating for it. The red tape simply needs removed and reformed, then go from there. The whole "risk/reward" statement is at times overblown, because the government really isn't holding business accountable, as they should. How many people went to jail for the financial crisis? No one? Why? Its probably because it wasn't just the traders of toxic assets, but I bet there are enough people in government that would have to be thrown in jail too, but since no one is held accountable.. |
I would say that a problem with corporate structures is that, outside of maybe having a corporate culture, they don't have memories. Old guard leaves, new guys come in, who don't remember the past, and then they push too much, and can take the economy down. Laws and regulations (and enforcement) are about the only thing society has, in order to retain a memory of the past, and implement wisdom of lessons learned, in order to prevent problems. Trying to say you just want to let mass amount of failure happen, ends up producing results that society doesn't want. There is no want to have tent cities pop up all over.
And yes, there is a big issue of accountability missing. One would need to have a cleaner system. Problem is that a really clean system is usually engineered and the byproduct of a degree of central planning. What you get, instead, is a hodgepodge of various interests dumbing down, and legistlators living in a buble detached from reality. Then you get groupthink in a market that leads to mayhem later. Everyone gets fooled, and there are no consequences.
