DEREGULATION

MORALITY AND THE LAW CLXIII
By Stephen Ellis

WHATS WRONG WITH DEREGULATION


Nobody asked me, but…

I doubt very much, no matter who you voted for, that there will be any disagreement as to the following:

1. John McCain has an excellent sense of humor. Those of us who saw him on Jay Leno’s “Tonight” show may wonder if he should be working as a stand-up comic. I don’t mean that in a negative way. His responses to Jay Leno’s questions were genuinely funny. Of course, they were intended to be funny, and it’s a tribute to the man who worked very hard to get elected and lost that he still maintains a a strong sense of humor.
2. Obama is already working very hard getting ready to become the President of the United States. If anyone thought that Obama was going to take a rest and relax after a grueling campaign, they were mistaken. I do not believe, in the seventy six years I’ve been alive, that I have ever seen a President-Elect work so hard at preparing his transition to take office as Barak Obama.

To me, this is a tribute to both candidates. Anyone who believes that either candidate would not have made a better president than George W. Bush, should not be wasting their time reading this blog because facts are meaningless to such people.

We are now engaged in a great economic turmoil. We can, understandably, cast the blame on the greed of some of Wall Street’s profiteers, and upon banks that made a profit center out of making money without lending their own money or upon insurance companies who took their safety reserves and invested them in questionable “derivatives” or to automobile manufacturing giants . More than anything else, we can cast the blame on the word “deregulation”. Personally, I hate regulations that make me do things in a certain way…but the fact is that there are a very high number of people who, if not regulated, have absolutely no conscience: they will rape and pillage everyone’s else’s economy, steal from the retirement accounts of hard-working people, etc.…just to fatten their own pockets. They will lie and artificially inflate the value of their company’s stocks to deceive the public. They make a mockery of the Securities Exchange Commission whose job it is to oversee them. So, as distasteful as it is, regulations are not only important, they are mandatory!

Plunderers like Michael Milkin, Gary Winnick, Lehman Brothers, Enron and Arthur Young always come out on top…while their investors are forced into bankruptcy. Usually, the investors are hard-working people who are trying to assure themselves of a decent retirement. It’s very difficult for someone who’s been on a salary all his/her life to set aside something for their later years after paying for their kids’ education, etc. So, many of these people believed the “hype” and TV ads about investments being secure…about real estate being better than money in the bank…about certified audits really being accurate…and invested their retirement accounts, their IRAs and their 401Ks with the plunderers.

Our Uncle Sam is our “Uncle” and not our “Dad”. The government should not be expected to step in and secure investments made foolishly or greedily. But, if there were strongly enforced regulations in place, the plunderers would not be able to entice unsophisticated investors into extremely sophisticated and risky schemes.

As I said…nobody asked me.