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Comment by whatok | Hacker News Reader

For people complaining about revolving doors, how do you get regulators with current industry expertise without.... industry experts?

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Why can't people excel and be experts while being a regulator? That's like saying police have to be criminals before they can be police or they won't be experts.

If the financial industry is doing things so complicated that they cannot be policed, then they should be made to define their actions so that they CAN be policed, or their actions should be illegal.

Should government bureaucrats who have never coded something be in charge of micromanaging internet companies?

I do know former coders managing government tech policy now. Don't assume they all lack technical knowledge. That's increasingly not the case from my experience.

I'm making an analogy to tech policy. Of course we had people with coding experience managing tech policy. Similarly, we want people with banking experience managing banking policy.

That's kinda the whole point of the previous comment.

It's not that you cannot play for Blackhawks for a few seasons, and then sign up with Rangers. As the revolving door metaphor suggests, the movement is both more frequent and continuous. Glenn Greenwald goes even further in With Liberty and Justice For Some, suggesting the government and the industry have in practice become two departments of the same organization, with employees being reassigned, but never actually leaving:

"People like [the Democratic appointees] Rubin, Summers, Patterson, and Gensler shuffle back and forth between the public and private sectors, taking turns as needed with their GOP counterparts. When in government, they ensure that laws and regulations are written to redound directly to the benefit of a handful of Wall Street firms, abolishing most regulatory safeguards that keep those behemoths in check. When the electoral tide turns against them, they return to those very firms and collect millions upon millions of dollars, profits made possible by the laws and regulations they implemented (or failed to implement) when they were in charge. Then, when their party returns to power, back they go into government, where they use their influence to ensure that the cycle keeps on going."

And if you don't care for a 9–5 back at your old bank, or your party holds the presidency for too long and you're kinda strapped for dineros, you just ask for a reassignment with a short period of unemployment. During the sabbatical, you visit your Wall Street office for a few hours, collect a "speaking fee"[1], and take a holiday. When you come back, infused with vitamin D and liquidity, your lesser-minded colleagues may think you never left or (gosh!) took a bribe.

[1] http://americablog.com/2013/07/tim-geithner-speaking-fees-go...

Would you trust a code reviewer who had never written a line of code or deployed an app?

You don't really.

The question that the revolving door complaint raises is whether these people can competently perform in these regulatory positions without bias.

The solution isn't picking different people, it's transparency and enforcing the checks and balances. Articles like this are important, because the SEC is notoriously bad at being transparent (getting a D- on FOIA) and it exists as an independent agency in the executive branch.

I dig your solution as well as some kind of limitations on "crossing the aisle" once you've gone over. Like former regulators have to have n years out of the job before being legally allowed to work for financial institutions or other ways to add distance and disincentive lenient regulation.

I have issues with employment restrictions, more on the public to private transition. A public sector job in almost any fashion is not going to pay as much as a private sector finance job. n years is overly punitive for someone who is likely not paid very well to begin with. Let's say you reduce it down to jobs only above a certain level. You will absolutely see a shift in how people pursue promotions and probably introduce a disincentive to even enter the field at a senior level.

Program/code the regulations into the financial systems instead of relying on the thumbs up from an easily corruptible human being.

Edit: immediately after posting this it occurred to me how terrible if not impossible this would be with the spaghetti code that is the tax and compliance legal code. So that would ideally have to be reformed, or rewritten and consolidated which is quite a big proposition

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