[ExI] Fwd: question

[Dan TheBookMan]

> On Feb 26, 2021, at 5:06 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> 
> Fettered by what?  Conservatives are always touting deregulation, but look what happened in Texas.  I am not sure that I understand the AI's point about self-regulation and the economy.  We have to regulate the safety of food, toys, and many other things.  These are costs to companies, for sure, but which regulations would you get rid of?  Certainly none of the above.  I also don't see the connection between morality and the economy, except for such things as employee theft and other methods of stealing from companies.  How would you go about improving the morality of a country?  Or even an individual?  Religions think they know but they don't.  bill w

The Texas energy crisis isn’t an example of an unfettered free market. Instead, it’s a matter of a state-level regulated energy sector, where it’s regulated, it seems, on behalf of big energy providers. (By the way, this is how much regulation works: big players lobby for regulations to keep out competition and basically rent-seek. Sometimes ‘secondary revaluations’ come in to play. This is new regulations attempt to mitigate the problems of earlier regulations — and often these are done to protect consumers or small players. But these are usually bandaids on a system regulated for the big players and connected interests.)

Deregulation is sometimes advocated by some so called. liberals too. The Carter administration oversaw and promoted airline and trucking deregulation. That seems to be one reason for low airfares and the kind of rapid delivery services that happened afterward. Of course, the devil is in the details. Sometimes a particular deregulation is really nothing more than allow big players to do as they please in an override heavily regulated industry. (Think of banking and securities. Both heavily regulated, yet loosing some rules usually doesn’t mean promoting a free market in either, but usually just allowing big players to do stuff they wouldn’t be able to do in an actual free market. Of course, bailouts don’t help this either.)

Regards,

Dan 

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