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Comment by garmaine | Hacker News Reader

Data point of one: I’m a millennial that suffered through the financial collapse, having graduated with massive student debt from a private school while basically being unemployable in the market due to lack of experience, and even once I got a job watching housing prices rise faster than my savings for a down payment.

But this didn’t drive me to be anti-free market. Far from it. The financial collapse was due to the power of the banks which existed as a government authorized oligarchy. Allowing banks monopoly over the mechanisms of monetary policy is the source of the problem. 2007 was NOT an unregulated market by any reasonable measure.

Don’t let your partisanship blind you to be grievances of those who align with neither yours nor the opposing party platforms.

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You have a weird assumption here that somehow if there were less regulations the banks would somehow have less of a monopoly on the mechanisms of monetary policy. That's not how it works, not in theory or practice.

If there were less regulations you wouldn’t need to be a bank to do what a bank does. That was my point. Why so t we see the level of innovation we have in web in the financial sector? Operating a fintech company requires as much legal compliance as it does code and this protects incumbents and lets them extract rent from our society.

The GP seems to be saying “let’s regulate these rent seekers.” I’m saying “let’s stop paying rents in the first place.”

It is a weird, but entirely correct, assumption that all markets operate in a legal framework and are thus regulated.

What does 'more banking regulation' or 'less banking regulation' even mean? If the government enacts 'more' legislation that ossifies the practices from before financial crisis, that clearly cannot be an improvement.

Talking about more or less regulation is just setting the government up to be manipulated by the highest bidder, who can specify what changes in a way that looks like 'more' or 'less' of something. The rules need to be changed to promote honesty and not create perverse incentives. This requires /different/ regulation, and to demand specific changes. Nobody agrees on what those changes should be afaik.

> It is a weird, but entirely correct, assumption that all markets operate in a legal framework and are thus regulated.

I’m not sure what you’re saying here. Counter pint: drug markets.

Unregulated corporate power destroyed your life and your response is "no, this is actually good" and then you tell us not to be blinded by partisan ideology?

Banks are regulated. They require licenses to operate. Can I operate my own bank and issue retail credit without regulations? No?

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