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your argument is fallacious: Basically saying: Look there was SOME government regulation. The market failed, so it is the fault of regulation. less regulation is the solution.

While if you flip the coin you can have: The industry was not regulated enough. Recently there has been a trend to de-regulation, and letting the market free to do what they want to do, and this let us to this huge mess. The markets are made out of people, that have a herd mentality, and only view their short term interest, while ignoring the long term ones.

And there are many experiments to prove this: (insert many experiments done on how people would rather have 5$ today, then $20 if few weeks, even though the later is a much better deal).

While you fail to mention the fact that the government is not forcing anybody to actually acknowledge the rating agencies ratings, and to invest by them.

If the market was smart, why didn't reconginze the problem with the ratings, and avoid it?

Another thing that libertarians fail to mention is that in the late 20s, early 30s, a lot of this regulation, or agencies, didn't exist!! Yet the market failed to protect against themselves, and we had the great depression.

Please explain that!




No, his argument isn't fallacious, but yours is a straw man.

He is NOT saying that regulation was the problem, and he's not saying that less regulation will solve the crisis. He's saying that blaming libertarianism, free markets and "unfettered capitalism" is a fallacy - simply because the financial market is neither of those.


The crisis existed largely because existing regulations were loosened, and those that weren't were laxly enforced against people who were gaming the system. The markets in the late 1800s and 1920s were both largely libertarian, free, and unfettered -- and both failed pretty miserably, which is why we have (flawed) institutions like the SEC now.


the argument sounds very similar to communist apologetics saying: "blaming communism on the Soviet collapse is a fallacy, simply because the Soviet Union (and all the communist nations) were never real communist countries like Marx and Engels intended".


I don't know what you mean about the trend for deregulation -- the amount of regulation and spending on enforcement has significantly increased in the past 8 years. So if anything, we are more regulated now than we have ever been.




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