Categories
free trade & free markets national politics & policies too much government

Don’t Kill The Angels

President Obama is blasting what he calls “the furious efforts of industry lobbyists” to fend off tighter regulation of the financial industry.

Pretending that Fed credit expansion and governmental incentives to take on temporarily cheap mortgages had no part in the current crisis, officials carefully direct our attention elsewhere. Widespread moral hazard stemming from bailouts, both guaranteed and implied? Shhhh.

But the government, uninterested in regulating itself and its own excesses, is instead targeting you and me.

“Tighter regulation” means less freedom to make your own decisions about your own time and resources.

Venture Beat magazine reports on a provision of Senator Chris Dodd’s proposed reform that would make it much harder for so-​called “angel” investors to fund new start-ups. 

An angel investor is somebody willing to fund a new business with his own wealth, even when venture capitalists managing others people’s funds decline to invest. Dodd’s bill would force start-​ups raising funds to register with the SEC and wait 120 days for the filing to be processed. It would also increase the minimum capital that “accredited investors” must have in the bank before the government will permit them to invest.

Based on nobody’s considered judgment about a particular venture but only on lawmakers’ nebulous fear of entrepreneurial risk, the proposed law would kill in the crib many pioneering and timely, must-​act-​now innovations. 

Accidentally, I’m sure, current businesses would be spared competition from upstarts.

And this is supposed to help the economy?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets

Fear of Falling

The fear of falling is innate. Newborns have it.

The fear of falling prices is different.

What? Who fears falling prices?

Politicians and investors and the big boys in big business, that’s who. When all sorts of prices fall, it means that their plans for ever-​upward growth hit the hard rocks of economic reality. And these downturns sure can hurt. A lot.

Yet there’s an awful lot of evidence that you just have to weather these periods. You shouldn’t panic. And you definitely should not try to “prop things up.”

But that is exactly what politicians generally try to do in an economic downturn — they try to prevent some set of prices from falling.

Post-​Great War depression in Britain, and America’s own beginning of the Great Depression … in both downturns there were huge political forces at work, trying to prevent a sector of prices from hitting their natural floors. In those cases, it was mainly wages that got propped up.

The effect? Massive unemployment.

I’m no economic historian, so I hate to tread these waters. But I’m not going to play Santayana’s fool, forgetting history and then forced to repeat it like Sisyphus’s rock-​and-​roll classic on permanent skip-​repeat/​skip-​repeat.

So remember: Propping up prices in the past didn’t work. They won’t work now with housing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.