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The New York Times yesterday reported that stock-fraud prosecutions have gone down the last several years, implying that the Bush administration’s lax attitude toward regulation of Wall Street let the Madoff scam go on for so long. Whether FBI and SEC fraud investigations are really down, I can’t say, but let’s accept that they are. This hardly makes the case for regulation. Why? Laws against fraud are not the same thing as regulation. Fraud is theft of property by deception. Thus a law against it is a law protecting property. In contrast, regulation is an imposition by government unrelated to any specific wrongdoing; it violates property. Repealing laws against fraud (or the refusal to investigate and prosecute it) is not deregulation. If it were, so would repeal of the law against armed robbery be deregulation. No one talks that way — for a good reason. There is a big difference between regulation and prohibitions on depriving people of their property. Anti-market people like to conflate the two categories to score points for the regulatory state.

By the way, if the government were to vigorously investigate fraud, it might indict everyone who keeps Social Security going.

Cross-posted at Anything Peaceful.

This short film is 110 years old and now you can watch it on YouTube. That makes it awesome. I mention this partly because awesome things, being awesome, are worth appreciating for their own sake. And also because you’re awesome, and though the world is cold and dark right now but we’ve set aside some time — all of us, people in every nation, every creed and every age, whenever we’ve been able to — at about this time of year to light the lights and make hot drinks and to gather celebrate goodwill, peace, comfort and joy. It is a time to remember that we can be awesome, that though the world is big and empty and dark and cold, there is also warmth and light, and it can come from us — from the desire and the will and the craft that you, each of you, have for making marvels never before seen, and for projecting them with the light of a magic lantern to the wonder of your fellows; and from the solidarity and admiration and love that we, all of us, can share with each other for what we have together, comforting and inspiring and driving each of us to become our most awesome selves. You’re all awesome, really, and you deserve to be reminded of it, and I hope you all will be.

Happy Christmas, y’all.

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

Jan Narveson’s response to Nicole Hassoun’s comments is now online.

Here’s the final roster for the Molinari Society’s upcoming fifth annual Symposium being held in conjunction with the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in Philadelphia, December 27-30, 2008:

GIX-3. Monday, 29 December 2008, 1:30-4:30 p.m.
Molinari Society symposium: Authors Meet Critics:
Crispin Sartwell’s Against the State: An Introduction to Anarchist Political Theory and
Roderick T. Long and Tibor R. Machan, eds., Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a Government Part of a Free Country?
Philadelphia Marriott Downtown, 1201 Market Street, Room TBA

Chair: Carrie-Ann Biondi (Marymount Manhattan College)

Critics:
Jennifer McKitrick (University of Nebraska-Lincoln)
Christopher Morris (University of Maryland)
Nicole Hassoun (Carnegie Mellon University)

Authors:
John Hasnas (Georgetown University)
Charles Johnson (Molinari Institute)
Roderick T. Long (Auburn University)
Jan Narveson (University of Waterloo-Canada)
Crispin Sartwell (Dickinson College)
William Thomas (Atlas Society)

The APA, ever vigilant against the menace of free riders (and, I suspect, grossly overestimating the inelasticity of demand for APA sessions) isn’t
revealing the location of the session until we pick up our final programs at registration. But I’ll try to post the info as soon as I learn it.

The common reaction to the Bernard Madoff $50 billion financial scam was wholly expected. As Los Angeles Times columnist Tim Rutten wrote, “The lesson is one that becomes clearer with each excruciating turn of the Wall Street screw. The long, bipartisan experiment with financial deregulation has failed utterly. The argument that a return to rigorous oversight will somehow stifle Wall Street’s ‘creativity’ is no longer convincing. Whatever its theoretical costs, regulation is dramatically cheaper than intervention. And absolutist insistence on the superiority of ‘individual choice’ and ‘free markets’ now is exposed as so much vacant rhetoric. Any system that permits a scam artist like Madoff to deceive not just widows and orphans but also sophisticated investors, like Fairfield Greenwich Group’s Walter Noel and Hollywood’s Jeffrey Katzenberg, isn’t a market at all; it’s a shooting gallery.”

The last sentence is a tipoff that something is wrong with this outlook. Financial regulation is usually proposed to protect the unsophisticated. People knowledgeable about finance and securities presumably can take care of themselves. But what makes the Madoff scandal so noteworthy is that the most sophisticated types were taken in, even though several experts sounded alarms. Why?

If you’re reading this on my old blog site, go to my new blog site.

If you’re reading this on my new blog site, welcome to my new blog site! (And before long, the old site will simply redirect here.)

My blog’s former host, Yahoo, was a disaster; I’d been increasingly plagued by hidden spam ads, RSS failures, and so forth, and Yahoo’s customer service was the absolutely least helpful I’ve ever encountered.

So – brand new server, brand new day. All the old posts, comments, etc. have been moved here. And thanks very much to Brandon Snider for assisting this transition!

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22 December 2008

NWTRCC is encouraging people who signed up for the 2008 War Tax Boycott to sign up again for this coming year’s boycott.

While there is reason to celebrate the end of the Bush presidency and a White House occupied by the Obama family, the kind of change that we want to see won’t come without continued commitment of all kinds of grassroots organizing and pressure. Obama’s plan to end the war in Iraq does not offer the immediacy that that is so necessary to save lives, and with Robert Gates staying on at the “war department,” it’s less clear that “ending the war” means removing all troops and foreign contractors from Iraq. And Obama has made it clear that thousands of U.S. troops will be moved to Afghanistan where civilian deaths are climbing and there’s growing anger at the presence of foreign troops and endless war.

Refusing to be complicit with war is as important as ever. Refusing to pay some or all of federal taxes is a powerful way to say no to war and yes to redirecting those dollars to human needs programs.

We’ve updated the website, http://wartaxboycott.org/ and we’re sticking with redirection projects from last spring — Direct Aid Iraq in Jordan and Common Ground Health Clinic in New Orleans. The online form is at http://wartaxboycott.org/regform.php, or you can print out a form on the “Tools” page and send it in.