Amerika

The financial crisis even prompted the Republican Greenspan, a staunch believer in free markets, to propose that government consider tougher regulations, including requiring financial firms that package mortgages into securities to keep a portion as a check on quality.

He said other regulatory changes should be considered, too, in such areas as fraud.

ABC

So there’s a lot of talk of “regulation,” and the people who like the idea of no regulation like anarchists and libertarians complain. But what is regulation? It is rules that oversee a process.

If we think more closely, we realize that every process needs some kind of overseer, or some kind of leader, because any process can be exploited. Nothing manages itself like decay. Just like liberalism is at an advantage because it is deconstructive, or focused on small pieces and not big realities, decay is at an advantage because it’s a simpler process than construction.

We like the idea of deferring authority to some governmental system, economic system, social system etc that “just runs itself” like an answering machine, but that is illusory. We need someone guiding the process everywhere; that someone should be smart. Of course underlying this is that none of us trust the electorate, because not only have we all seen how they pick The Other Goddamn Side half the time, but we’ve also all seen the even greater failures. And we see how the voters are more influenced by trends, media, social memes and propaganda than sound logic.

A smart civilization admits it can’t outrun power. You either manage power, or it manages you. Right now that tail is wagging our dog here in the USA. Wonder if we’ll figure it out before we collapse into third-world status?