On regulation and deregulation

The real question is: "Who makes the rules?"

The idea that you can somehow have banks and corporations just moving money and goods around WITHOUT rules is a foolish pipe dream: won't happen, can't happen. So who makes the rules?

Well, we've seen that recently, haven't we? In the absence of government regulation, the rules are written by the lenders and banks. So you have the rules being written and re-written by people who are actually in the middle of playing the game.

And what do you wind up with? You wind up with rules where the lenders are almost completely unaccountable for their own risk. But they spread that risk to everybody else. They make the profit. YOU take their risk for them. Because they wrote the rules.

And that's what you get if you take the authority to regulate away from regulatory bodies. You still get regulation. But you get regulation where the consumer is the only one bound by any rules.