Our heavily regulated market is considered "unfettered capitalism" in your mind?
What "heavily regulated market"? Yes, we have some regulations here and there; but the important ones got ignored and gutted starting in 1980 (for banking, at least). The 1933 Banking Act was 38 pages; today's banking regs are over 7,000 and counting upward, yet they still don't prohibit the most dangerous banking practices as the 1933 Act did.
Why? Profit. Short-term, enormous, and destabilizing profit. Allow the regulated to write the rules pertaining to their actions, and allow them to obfuscate enough to dissuade any research into the actual policies written, and allow them to fund the campaigns of those passing the regs into law, and you have today.
(Your second paragraph appears to be complete blathering nonsense. I have no idea what point you were trying to make, and won't bother to impose an interpretation. Moving on.)
Wow. That's pretty much the exact opposite of everything we know about economics.
"We?" No, maybe "you," but I can assure you I've heard and read some excellent economists that can confirm what I've said. Just as it's useless to have no rules in a game, it's dangerous to have no checks on excess. Life should not be Calvinball.
Were the gas panics of the 1970s solved by rationing?
The gas panics were largely caused by the wrong regs. There were price controls on gasoline at the time; price controls that limited what sellers could charge. Since the country's crude supply had peaked in 1970, once the OPEC nations turned down the taps, the shortage was immediate, but worse, the gas companies couldn't charge enough to slow consumption.
Maximum pricing might work in a world with unlimited crude, but in 1973 all the rules changed. Thus, rationing was needed as a temporary means of preventing outright supply shocks to many parts of the country. The maximum prices (and other silly regs) were repealed later.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2014-02-09 09:04 pm (UTC)What "heavily regulated market"? Yes, we have some regulations here and there; but the important ones got ignored and gutted starting in 1980 (for banking, at least). The 1933 Banking Act was 38 pages; today's banking regs are over 7,000 and counting upward, yet they still don't prohibit the most dangerous banking practices as the 1933 Act did.
Why? Profit. Short-term, enormous, and destabilizing profit. Allow the regulated to write the rules pertaining to their actions, and allow them to obfuscate enough to dissuade any research into the actual policies written, and allow them to fund the campaigns of those passing the regs into law, and you have today.
(Your second paragraph appears to be complete blathering nonsense. I have no idea what point you were trying to make, and won't bother to impose an interpretation. Moving on.)
Wow. That's pretty much the exact opposite of everything we know about economics.
"We?" No, maybe "you," but I can assure you I've heard and read some excellent economists that can confirm what I've said. Just as it's useless to have no rules in a game, it's dangerous to have no checks on excess. Life should not be Calvinball.
Were the gas panics of the 1970s solved by rationing?
The gas panics were largely caused by the wrong regs. There were price controls on gasoline at the time; price controls that limited what sellers could charge. Since the country's crude supply had peaked in 1970, once the OPEC nations turned down the taps, the shortage was immediate, but worse, the gas companies couldn't charge enough to slow consumption.
Maximum pricing might work in a world with unlimited crude, but in 1973 all the rules changed. Thus, rationing was needed as a temporary means of preventing outright supply shocks to many parts of the country. The maximum prices (and other silly regs) were repealed later.