Comments on: Double Down

By: Carl

Carl — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 18:50:04 +0000

Yeah, they’re kind of in the driver’s seat because (to mix the metaphor) they’re the available engine of prosperity. If the gummint wants to do what it wants to do – health care reform, e.g. – it’s going to need business to be clicking along. But even when business knows there’s a problem, individual businesses can’t regulate themselves or risk competitive disadvantage, nor can business as a whole regulate itself because there’s no institutional mechanism for that and indeed no such coherent entity as ‘business as a whole’.

So government ends up being the default instrument of regulations that are simultaneously fought tooth-and-nail and tacitly understood by most everyone to be necessary. At which point there’s a new playing field and they all go back to figuring out how to game it. It’s not a system that produces linear outcomes, but how could it be with so many actors with so many agendas?

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 01:43:42 +0000

It’s interesting. I just get the opposite impression: that guys like Yingling are in the driver’s seat, and that the regulators are more or less taking the back seat for the next round of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.

By: AndrewSshi

AndrewSshi — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 01:37:18 +0000

What I got from the article that you linked to was something entirely different, a determination on the part of regulators to make sure that we avoid the same mistakes. Of course the people that the regulations touch are going to be saying that they don’t need it. Such a statement is as unremarkable as someone in the petrochemical industry saying that clean air regulations are unnecessary.