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| quote: | Originally posted by DigiNut
I'm amazed at how you've managed to completely miss the point.
If your claim is that regulation of some activity is necessary or even beneficial, then it's not a sufficient argument to point to a disaster that "could have" been averted with the right rules, because that presumes that (a) the rule-makers had foreknowledge of the disaster, and (b) that the rules themselves don't alter the subjects' behaviour in unexpected ways, potentially causing a different (maybe bigger) disaster. Neither of these are true.
The canonical example of this is airport security. Every time there's some terrorist act or threat or other disaster, they analyze what happened and put in place new rules to prevent the same thing from happening again. But as we all know, it's a futile endeavour because the rules and therefore the loopholes are known (such as putting "Hotel America" for the destination, knowing that nobody will bother to check on it).
As a result, we end up with convoluted systems of seemingly pointless rules that make everybody's lives more difficult and do nothing to prevent the real problem that they are intended to prevent. And much of the time, the problems are actually exacerbated by other, politically-motivated rules ("no profiling") and the problems could be better solved by elimination of those rules, not the addition of new ones.
The fact that industry lobbyists are campaigning against potentially harmful regulations (I say potentially - I can admit to not knowing every detail about it) does absolutely nothing to prove your point or the legitimacy of your example. Most people who blame "derivatives" for every financial problem under the sun don't even really understand what a "derivative" is, what kinds of derivatives there are, how they work, or why they landed so many people into so much trouble. They just heard somewhere that "derivatives" were the problem and therefore must be regulated. They're the same people who blame "speculators" for price volatility, manage to push the speculators out of the market, and are surprised when the volatility triples. Now I'm not necessarily claiming that you're one of these, I don't know how educated you are, but so far you've done nothing to demonstrate that you understand the proposed regulations, or the root problem, or the reasons why many people think that the regulations are unnecessary or won't help or will cause more problems than they solve.
When it comes to distracted driving, we've got a good 40 years of research and volumes of statistics to identify behavioural patterns and key areas of risk, and even then, nobody is completely sure that laws like Bill 118 will solve the problem, we just think that they will. The anti-derivatives lobby has done none of this due diligence, it's all just a knee-jerk reaction to the financial crisis with no study of the long-term effects of regulation (notably the loss or degradation of a very important tool for investors to mitigate their risk). And as I've pointed out before, what little evidence we do have does not seem to be in their favour; other countries, like Canada, were able to prevent the same issues without "help" from the government.
If you're trying to argue that regulation is effective then you need a controlled test that takes into account people learning from their mistakes and circumventing the rules. In your derivatives example, you'd need to show that under the same economic conditions, companies or industries that were forced to follow some regulation did better than companies or industries that weren't, and you'd need to be able to show that you accounted for other fundamental differences. A before-and-after test is not valid evidence - and even if it were, we don't have one!
Now if you have any clue what you're talking about then please, feel free to explain instead of posting a tangential article and "kthxbai" retort. Otherwise we're forced to assume that you were just trying to sound smart. |
Naturally the "kthxbai" thing is a trolling maneuver. Thanks for the half dozen paragraphs.
To boil down your retort, you're saying that you and I don't properly understand the issue (derivatives) and that those who are attempting to regulate them should make sure they know what they're doing (cause we don't). Well, that's true.
Honestly, I think my original point was well understood by most casual readers. Those interested in nit-picking casual banter on a casual web forum are perhaps more inclined to (in this order) appreciate the simple off-hand comment for the author's intent, then decide to flex some gray matter and and try to poke a wet finger through any possible holes in the comment. And here we are. Upon taking you to task after your original response, you have abandon your original intent (making me look like a dumb-ass, dumb-ass though I may actually be) and simply claim that neither of us have the appropriate knowledge to win the argument.
Well, I am at least as guilty as you. It takes two to make this happen and here I am on a Saturday night with a triple shot of Wild Turkey bourbon in front of my keyboard, sipping between paragraphs of a fruitless argument.
I surrender.
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