[Liberator]

If you want to deal with the corruption and scams, reign in the free market and pass legislation to limit what companies can get away with. This includes dumping waste or union busting, since in the end its average Joe's who suffer for it.

Such legislation exists.  The corruption came into play when certain parties in the government(who are going to be out of a job come November) eased the restrictions and are talking about MORE laws and agencies to deal with the problems.  The problem is that the existing laws weren't enforced as stringently as they should have been.

As an aside, don't try to paint me or anyone else who espouses a free market as being for anarchy in the marketplace.  It's just illogical to constrain the parts of society that actually contribute wealth to society unnecessarily.

[SpardaSon21]

Yep, I read in the paper today the SEC Inspector General discovered 31 cases of senior employees at the SEC watching porn during business hours, just in the last two-and-a-half years.  A senior attorney at its Washington headquarters spent up to eight hours a day watching porn.  Oh, and the AP said the memo issued by Inspector General Kotz is a response to an earlier request by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa.

And this wasn't a story by the local paper, it was by the AP.

[bobbtmann]

As an aside, don't try to paint me or anyone else who espouses a free market as being for anarchy in the marketplace.  It's just illogical to constrain the parts of society that actually contribute wealth to society unnecessarily.

Its true, there are laws that aren't enforced. From what I can tell, being in Alberta, is that this leniency is given because of free market ideologies. We cling to this notion that because parts of society make money, they must be good for the country. But in province of Alberta, the free market hasn't really shown itself to be very beneficent. Insurance, electricity, natural gas have all been deregulated and privatized, citing competition and benefits to the consumer. Those sectors now have massive profits, and the benefit to society? Sky rocketing prices for the consumer. Now they want to privitize health care in Alberta and their reasons haven't changed. It'll increase competition and lower prices. Hasn't happened before, probably won't happen this time.


So it seems what is illogical is assuming the that parts of society that make wealth actually contribute wealth to society.

And that porn bust, that's unfortunate.

[SpardaSon21]

No one has actually been busted yet, and knowing the proclivities of all large organizations to cover their asses and sweep things under rugs, not much will happen.

EDIT: And about utilities, sometimes those do need to be regulated, especially in the case of a monopoly, which services like natural gas and electricity are.

You should probably check Albertan law though concerning insurance regulations, as it may be like California's electricity market where "de-regulation" is actually "re-regulation", which in our case led to not enough electricity due to caps on sale prices for electricity by utilities but no caps on purchase prices by utilities, leading to an effective shortage and all those rolling blackouts.  If Albertan insurance companies have a bunch of regulations and mandates on coverage that may explain the prices.

Oh, and sometimes de-regulation is a great thing; U.S. commercial trucking and airlines used to be very, very regulated, and now they're far superior to when they were so tightly regulated.

[Flipside]

Thing is, the concept of a Free Market is a concept of 'folding' profits back into the industry, whilst that is happening, there is no problem with it, but the problem was that it had got to the point that so much was being skimmed off the top that there was not enough left to fold back into the industry, profit became more important than maintaining quality of service, cheaper and cheaper methods were found for producing goods, but the savings were not being reflected back onto the customer.

Greed is one thing, if someone complains that an investor is earning a lot, then tough, should've got into the same line of work themselves, but when that greed has got to a stage where it is actually damaging the economy, rather than keeping it vibrant, then there is a problem to my mind.

[karajorma]

No I'm not saying fraud is OK.

I'm saying you indict the dumbasses who committed the fraud, not the whole company.  If it's the entire board of directors or whoever, indict the ones that committed the crime, not the organization they work for.  Unless. of course, your goal is to smear the company/industry in a bid to accomplish some other goal, which I am still not sold on this not coming down from somewhere on or around Capitol Hill.

Unless of course, your goal is to make sure that Goldman Sachs don't keep the money which was earned through fraud and that the clients who were defrauded gain some restitution.

[Kosh]

No I'm not saying fraud is OK.

I'm saying you indict the dumbasses who committed the fraud, not the whole company.  If it's the entire board of directors or whoever, indict the ones that committed the crime, not the organization they work for.  Unless. of course, your goal is to smear the company/industry in a bid to accomplish some other goal, which I am still not sold on this not coming down from somewhere on or around Capitol Hill.

And, yes, I know the SEC is an "independent" entity from the administration.

But the company as whole did commit fraud because it was well known within the company. If the company gets away with just a slap on the wrist, it's written off as just the cost of doing business, therefore there's little to no incentive to play by the rules.

[Goober5000]

Its true, there are laws that aren't enforced. From what I can tell, being in Alberta, is that this leniency is given because of free market ideologies.

The leniency is given because, de facto, there is one standard for people with "connections" and another standard for everybody else.  It's why Congress was so quick to jump on China for lead-based paint in toys, but are willing to waive testing requirements for US-based Mattel.

You're confusing free market capitalism with corporatism.  The two are very different.  In a true free market, there wouldn't be double standards such as these.

[bobbtmann]

That's the thing about free markets. When you get to the top, you'd probably want to stay there. You get friends in government to help you out: tax breaks, contracts, special privileges, whatever. If greed drives the system, then greed is going to have the last say. If a really big company can influence government for its own gain, why not?

Free market principles work fine on paper since you can always make up a solution to any problem. Once applied to the real world, however, other forces come into play. Like the inevitable corruption of government, and the rise of cronyism and corporatism. Often when free market systems fail (which they inevitably do) the defenders of free markets always try and pin the blame on distortions of some sort. The funny thing about distortions is that there's no way to prove that they were the cause.

Could you imagine if, say, physicists worked that way. If they didn't like a value recieved in an experiment they could just blame it on distortions. The answer they want is right, there was just something wrong with the experiement. Man, we'd still believe that ether was the medium through which light travels through.

[SpardaSon21]

You yourself mentioned the corruption of government.

If a double standard in terms of regulation/tax breaks isn't a distortion of the free market, I don't know what is.

[Mongoose]

Could you imagine if, say, physicists worked that way. If they didn't like a value recieved in an experiment they could just blame it on distortions. The answer they want is right, there was just something wrong with the experiement. Man, we'd still believe that ether was the medium through which light travels through.

We kind of do that right now with dark matter/energy, but that's a whole other story.

[General Battuta]

Could you imagine if, say, physicists worked that way. If they didn't like a value recieved in an experiment they could just blame it on distortions. The answer they want is right, there was just something wrong with the experiement. Man, we'd still believe that ether was the medium through which light travels through.

We kind of do that right now with dark matter/energy, but that's a whole other story.

Not exactly.

[Mongoose]

Maybe not entirely, but I think it holds up in a certain sense. We have this observational data that doesn't match our current physical models, so we've decided that there's all this material out there we can't see that's causing the discrepancy, as opposed to more seriously considering the possibility that our current physical models don't hold up properly over the scales in question.  I've never been entirely comfortable with the concept of dark matter, as it feels far too much like a fudge-factor designed to bend what we're seeing to fit in with what we think we already know.  The history of physics contains several examples of a similar process (the good ol' luminiferous aether comes to mind), and most of them didn't hold up too well in the long run.

[General Battuta]

The possibility that gravity works differently is indeed being examined and tested. However theories based around that concept haven't stood up to scrutiny so far.

[Flipside]

Well, the whole argument wasn't helped by the Bullet Cluster research, where NASA announced they'd found proof of Dark Matter when, in truth, all they'd found was evidence that implied it. There's an interesting paper called 'Can MOND take a Bullet' where the same light-bending viewed in the Bullet cluster is put through the Modified Newtonian Dynamics framework, and its findings suggested that yes, it most likely could be explained using either theory.

Edit: I might split this discussion out if it gets rolling, since it's quite interesting, but not really relevant to this particular thread

[Blue Lion]

Nah, they're totally related

[Kosh]

CNN is streaming the hearing now. After listening to these subpeonoe'd Goldman Sachs emails it is blatantly obvious the company committed massive fraud against its clients as well as intentionally have conflicts of interest by shortselling deals that they were selling to their clients. Unbelievable.