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Regulation Quotes

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Regulation Quotes

“The man whose public spirit is prompted altogether by humanity and benevolence, will respect the established powers and privileges even of individuals, and still more those of the great orders and societies, into which the state is divided. Though he should consider some of them as in some measure abusive, he will content himself with moderating what he often cannot annihilate without great violence. When he cannot conquer the rooted prejudices of the people by reason and persuasion, he will not attempt to subdue them by force; but will religiously observe what, by Cicero, is justly called the divine maxim of Plato, never to use violence to his country no more than to his parents. He will accommodate, as well as he can, his public arrangements to the confirmed habits and prejudices of the people; and will remedy, as well as he can, the inconveniencies which may flow from the want of those regulations which the people are averse to submit to. When he cannot establish the right, he will not disdain to ameliorate the wrong; but like Solon, when he cannot establish the best system of laws, he will try to establish the best that the people can bear.”

“It's all very well to run around saying regulation is bad, get the government off our backs, etc. Of course our lives are regulated. When you come to a stop sign, you stop; if you want to go fishing, you get a license; if you want to shoot ducks, you can shoot only three ducks. The alternative is dead bodies at the intersection, no fish, and no ducks. OK? (Getting Control of the Frontier, Gainsville Sun, March 22, 1995)”

“The defining feature of world politics post the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) has been the rise of right-wing populists, who have disrupted politics. It wasn't meant to be this way. Conventional wisdom at the time was that the GFC would lead to the 'social democratic moment'. The theory went that in the aftermath of the GFC - an event which exposed the dangers of relentless deregulation and fuelled an already existing rise of inequality - progressive parties, with a preference for appropriately calibrated regulation and redistribution, would benefit. Like much conventional wisdom, reality proved otherwise. Instead, it's been the right-wing populists' moment. The charlatans' moment. First, they disrupted their own parties, then they disrupted politics more broadly. (p.14-15)”

“With discipline, you can lose weight, you can excel in work, you can win the war.”

“Creativity without discipline will struggle, creativity with discipline will succeed.”

“But through years of myth-making and fear-sowing, Christianity meta-morphosed antichrists into a single Antichrist, an apocalyptic villain and Christian bogeyman used to scare people as much as Santa Claus is used to regulate children's behavior. After years of studying the concept, I began to realize the Antichrist is a character--a metaphor--who exists in nearly all religions under different names, and maybe there is some truth in it, a need for such a person. But from another perspective, this person could be seen as not a villain but a final hero to save people from their own ignorance. The apocalypse doesn't have to be fire and a brimstone. It could happen on a personal level.”

“As a self-appointed spokesperson for the importance of feelings, I feel like a pariah among my peers. My poor colleagues are in the thrall of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Scientifically hamstrung CBT barely recognizes the legitimacy of feelings! They are phenomena that must be subjected to affect regulation via processes that can turn people into emotional eunuchs.”

“The crash did not cause the Depression: that was part of a far broader malaise. What it did was expose the weaknesses that underpinned the confidence and optimism of the 1920s - poor distribution of income, a weak banking structure and insufficient regulations, the economy's dependence on new consumer goods, the over-extension of industry and the Government's blind belief that promoting business interests would make America uniformly prosperous.”

“When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms, and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class. In place of the old bourgeois society with its classes and class antagonisms we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”

“There has never been a 'war on drugs'! In our history we can only see an ongoing conflict amongst various drug users – and producers. In ancient Mexico the use of alcohol was punishable by death, while the ritualistic use of mescaline was highly worshipped. In 17th century Russia, tobacco smokers were threatened with mutilation or decapitation, alcohol was legal. In Prussia, coffee drinking was prohibited to the lower classes, the use of tobacco and alcohol was legal.”

“The Federal Reserve System had been established to prevent what actually happened. It was set up to avoid a situation in which you would have to close down banks, in which you would have a banking crisis. And yet, under the Federal Reserve system, you had the worst banking crisis in the history of the United States”

“How will the remaining portion of the community like to have the amusements that shall be permitted to them regulated by the religious and moral sentiments of the stricter Calvinists and Methodists? Would they not, with considerable peremptoriness, desire these intrusively pious members of society to mind their own business? This is precisely what should be said to every government and every public, who have the pretension that no person shall enjoy any pleasure which they think wrong.”

“That City of yours is a morbid excrescence. Wall Street is a morbid excrescence. Plainly it's a thing that has grown out upon the social body rather like -- what do you call it? -- an embolism, thrombosis, something of that sort. A sort of heart in the wrong place, isn't it? Anyhow -- there it is. Everything seems obliged to go through it now; it can hold up things, stimulate things, give the world fever or pain, and yet all the same -- is it necessary, Irwell? Is it inevitable? Couldn't we function economically quite as well without it? Has the world got to carry that kind of thing for ever? "What real strength is there in a secondary system of that sort? It's secondary, it's parasitic. It's only a sort of hypertrophied, uncontrolled counting-house which has become dominant by falsifying the entries and intercepting payment. It's a growth that eats us up and rots everything like cancer. Financiers make nothing, they are not a productive department. They control nothing. They might do so, but they don't. They don't even control Westminster and Washington. They just watch things in order to make speculative anticipations. They've got minds that lie in wait like spiders, until the fly flies wrong. Then comes the debt entanglement. Which you can break, like the cobweb it is, if only you insist on playing the wasp. I ask you again what real strength has Finance if you tackle Finance? You can tax it, regulate its operations, print money over it without limit, cancel its claims. You can make moratoriums and jubilees. The little chaps will dodge and cheat and run about, but they won't fight. It is an artificial system upheld by the law and those who make the laws. It's an aristocracy of pickpocket area-sneaks. The Money Power isn't a Power. It's respectable as long as you respect it, and not a moment longer. If it struggles you can strangle it if you have the grip...You and I worked that out long ago, Chiffan... "When we're through with our revolution, there will be no money in the world but pay. Obviously. We'll pay the young to learn, the grown-ups to function, everybody for holidays, and the old to make remarks, and we'll have a deuce of a lot to pay them with. We'll own every real thing; we, the common men. We'll have the whole of the human output in the market. Earn what you will and buy what you like, we'll say, but don't try to use money to get power over your fellow-creatures. No squeeze. The better the economic machine, the less finance it will need. Profit and interest are nasty ideas, artificial ideas, perversions, all mixed up with betting and playing games for money. We'll clean all that up..." "It's been going on a long time," said Irwell. "All the more reason for a change," said Rud.”

“an official with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission learned I was writing about specialization and contacted me to make sure I knew that specialization had played a critical role in the 2008 global financial crisis. “Insurance regulators regulated insurance, bank regulators regulated banks, securities regulators regulated securities, and consumer regulators regulated consumers,” the official told me. “But the provision of credit goes across all those markets. So we specialized products, we specialized regulation, and the question is, ‘Who looks across those markets?’ The specialized approach to regulation missed systemic issues.”

“I’m a firm a believer in the power of free enterprise to move the world forward. All that Soviet respect for science was no match for the American innovation machine once unleashed. The problem comes when the government is inhibiting innovation with overregulation and short-sighted policy. Trade wars and restrictive immigration regulations will limit America’s ability to attract the best and brightest minds, minds needed for this and every forthcoming Sputnik moment.”

“Recognizing that the boundaries of the market are ambiguous and cannot be determined in an objective way lets us realize that economics is not a science like physics or chemistry, but a political exercise... If the boundaries of what you are studying cannot be scientifically determined, what you are doing is not a science.”

“To appreciate how income taxation reduces prosperity form what it could be, imagine a 100 percent tax on incomes. We wouldn't expect much prosperity in such a society. People would have no incentive to earn money. They would devote resources to hiding the little they did earn. No investments would be made. No savings would exist to increase living standards. People's activities would be grossly influenced by the tax. If we lower the rate from 100 percent, the principle does not change. . . If you want less of something, tax it.”

“Markets are voting machines; they function by taking referenda. In the new world money market, for example, currency values are now decided by a constant referendum of thousands of currency traders in hundreds of trading rooms around the globe, all connected to each other by a vast electronic network giving each trader instant access to information about any factor that might affect values. That constant referendum makes it much harder for central banks and governments to manipulate currency values.”

“So Eurodollars were in one sense dollars like any other, but in another sense they were different because they had escaped into a market outside government control, where they could behave freely. It’s a bit like taking someone from their family home in the suburbs to a wild part of town and offering them whisky and cocaine. They are the same person but also different – more fun but also more irresponsible.”

“They have not the slightest awareness of how restricted their idea of "universality" is and of how few they are thinking when they talk about "everybody" and "anybody". Their universalism is a fellowship of the elite - of the elite as formed by absolutism. There is hardly a rule or a requirement of classicistic aesthetics which is not based on the ideas of this absolutism. The desire is that art should have a unifor character, like the state, should produce the effect of formal perfection, like the movement of a corps, that it should be clear and precise, like a decree, and be governed by absolute rules, like the life of every subject in the state. The artist should be no more left to his own devices than any other citizen; he should rather be guided by the law, by regulations, so as not to go astray in the wilderness of his own imagination.”

“By exiling human judgment in the last few decades, modern law changed role from useful tool to brainless tyrant. This legal regime will never be up to the job, any more than the Soviet system of central planning was, because ti can't think. The comedy of law's sterile logic--large POISON signs warning against common sand, spending twenty-two years on pesticide review and deciding next to nothing, allowing fifty-year-old white men to sue for discrimination--is all too reminiscent of the old jokes we used to hear about life in the Eastern bloc. Judgement is to law as water is to crops. It should not be surprising that law has become brittle, and society along with it.”

“Most young people have rebellious, anti-authoritarian impulses. They don't like being told what, when, or how to do something. It's ironic, then, that many of these same people embrace a system in which there would be far more regulations, many more bureaucrats micromanaging their lives, and far more rules and restrictions on how things can be done.”