When risk is obvious, drives slow down!
Economist Russell Roberts, who blogs at Cafe Hayek, suggests that we don’t know enough about complex financial systems to regulate them and that they would be safer to participants and us if we let them be built with the knowledge that we WOULD NOT RESCUE THEM:
We are what we repeatedly do. Not what
we say we are. Not what we’d like to be. But
what we do. What we do as a body politic
is rescue rich people from the consequences
of their decisions. That is bad for democracy
and bad for capitalism. Until we fix that, we
as citizens are playing a game of “heads—
Wall Street executives win a ridiculously
enormous amount, tails—they just win a ridiculous
amount, paid for by the rest of us.”
Until we fix that, little else matters.
Read all 5 pages.