An unstructured flow of verbiage - a stream of free associations - can be considered symptomatic of mental illness. The "Rambling Thoughts" referred to here, however, are not quite at that level of chaos. If this is, truly, to be a diary, it will simply reflect the particular ideas and images that enter my head at the moment, whether fleeting or contemplative.
On this particular day, my thought processes were stimulated by a column in The New York Times by Joe Nocera(http://www.nytimes.com/...).Thus inspired, , I put to text my own ruminations on the subject of government regulation of economic activity.
Reproduced here is the blog posted on Blogger.com.
So Jamie Dimon and his fellow "Lords of the Universe" have, once again, created a disaster of epic proportions playing the same casino games (with OPM) that crashed the world economy a few short years ago. And this, after lobbying so fiercely to limit or eliminate government regulation of their sneaky practices through what is referred to in the media as the "Volker Rule."
What lesson can we learn from the latest fiasco? (They, obviously, cannot or will not learn.) The unfettered market has no conscience. The market is, really, a bunch of people doing stuff. If those people are self-centered, narcissistic, aggressively competitive materialists, unlimited by such quaint notions as ethics and morality, as so many of the top financial people have proven themselves to be, the results will be, as we have seen, disastrous for the rest of us.Where the people we are discussing have no internal controls, and are motivated only by the narrowest view of personal self interest, then the benefit and well being of other 99.9% of society's membership must be protected by imposing controls from outside, such as the Dodd-Frank bill. Therein lies the absolute necessity of effective government regulation.
Joe Nocera, in his column, (The New York Times, May 12. 2012) makes the point succinctly, clearly and unambiguously,
"...that institutions that are ultimately backstopped by the taxpayer have a special responsibility to the country to stay out of trouble. Even if it means a lower share price. Or a smaller pay package. Or less risk-taking. Keeping banks from harming themselves is exactly what Dodd-Frank is intended to do." (Emphasis mine.)
And who is this government of which we speak? This thing that Ronald Reagen disparaged so heartily? Read the Constitution of the United States of America. In the very first line, it describes EXACTLY who is the government. It reads, "We the people..." When Reagen stated that the government is the problem, he may have meant, "you people are the problem."