(May 5, 2013 at 12:41 pm)festive1 Wrote: I agree there are times when the regulation gets too much to allow for competition, but on the whole I like that industries are regulated.
I suspect that this happens when businesses have a hand in writing the regulations in question. I think that government's relationship with business should almost be adversarial. Otherwise we wind up with regulatory bodies that are influenced (and sometimes staffed or even managed) by the very industry they are supposed to regulate. The results of this is that when disasters occur, a lot of anger is thrown at the companies responsible (BP, AIG, etc) but little is done to the people responsible and almost nothing is done to make whole those hurt by what happened (Enron).
I think we need regulations that protect people from incompetent or even malicious actions by businesses. But drowning businesses in ineffective regulation is worse; it makes us think that the government is protecting us until something terrible happens and suddenly it's "golly... how that loophole get there?"
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
