6 Comments Add your own

• 1. Kaus  |  September 21st, 2008 at 2:42 pm

  If the democrats and republicans would do their jobs with existing agencies appropriately regulating our lending institutions, we wouldn’t need a bailout. The man is a socialist.

• 2. Mr. Baseball  |  September 21st, 2008 at 5:53 pm

  I don’t agree with everything Sanders says, but he does make some interesting points. There needs to be a balance between free market capitalism and reasonable government regulation. Either extreme will not be good for the economy. With what’s happened, it’s obvious that existing agencies and regulations do not work. While we need to make changes, one real danger is overregulation which would stunt economic growth.

• 3. John Hamilton  |  September 21st, 2008 at 9:52 pm

  This whole housing mess isn’t a matter of not enough regulation, it’s a matter of too much regulation. The tax code and various government agencies favor home ownership, thus distorting the free market. Therefore the free market was not in place at all; it was a government-created distorted market, which never works.

• 4. Nate Legue  |  September 21st, 2008 at 11:19 pm

  I’m curious Mr. Hamilton, just what you mean by the assertion that government involvement “never works?” If creating incentives to favor individual home ownership is distorting the market, how would you suggest the government “distort” it? Markets can’t exist without the state declaring rules for buyers and sellers to abide by. Parties cannot make reasonable predictions and take reasonable risks about what will happen when enter into deals. Hence, without government regulation, they can’t do business. If governments say, hey, we won’t interfere to protect the little guy, then they’re just creating a different “incentive” for the biggest players on the market to dominate.
  My point is, there is no such thing as a market without regulation. There’s just different kinds of regulation. We can dispute what kind there should be, but we can’t pretend that markets can exist in a vacuum without some government “distortion.”

• 5. Pat Cunningham  |  September 22nd, 2008 at 7:23 am

  Well said, Nate. Without government regulation, there is no such thing as property — except that which is obtained or held by one’s own force or by the gracious consent of neighbors.

• 6. Millard Fillmore  |  September 22nd, 2008 at 8:20 am

  Which is why I think the whole ideological discussion over whether the bailout makes us “socialist” is so irrelevant. We’ve never had a completely “free” market, just as we’ve never had completely “free” speech — i.e., you cannot go yell “fire” in a theater. The discussion is all a matter of degree.

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