chuck martel, on Peter Wehner:

Yeah, the issue is a lack of regulation. If regulation worked so well, we wouldn’t have cops spending all night tracking down drunk drivers. There are several problems with the utopian theories of regulation. First of all, who makes ‘em? Is there some omniscient Solomon that can create a risk-free financial utopia? Or even a team of them? Doesn’t seem to be any evidence of that. And if there were, could they produce an attorney’s office wall of legalese that would guarantee that Harvard Business School MBAs couldn’t come up with financial instruments that dwarf the human genome in complexity? Probably not.

Secondly, regulations give people a false sense of security. “The SEC keeps track of these funds. There’s no way Bernie Madoff could be pulling any kind of a stunt.” We saw how well that worked.

The less regulation there is, the more opportunity there is for honesty and integrity. Minerals are a good example. You might think something is gold. You send it to a private company, a testing lab that determines if it is, and what it’s value is. The company has to perform or, unlike the government, it goes out of business.