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Comment by wtbob | Hacker News Reader

> After the Great Depression, a number of laws were put in place, in particular the Glass-Steagall act ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass%E2%80%93Steagall_Legislat.... ) that led to 50 years of relative financial stability.

That's a post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy.

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There's definitely a chance of that, but I think the repeal of those laws then being immediately followed by a return to damaging volatility is indicative that it was more than just coincidence.

Your assumption is that the crash was caused by the repeal. Another possibility is that the infrastructure and power structure was rotten and over leveraged anyway and the repeal catalyzed the process, because the gsa merely served to conceal the mendacity of the banking industry.

So you're saying the system was greedy and corrupt, that the laws prevented those features from getting out of control, and when we took the laws away they ran wild... therefore we should take the laws away?

no, the system was greedy and corrupt, and the collapse gave us a chance to sweep away the greedy and corrupt parts and increase public skepticism in the system. The laws hid that and gave cover to the continued theft of the general public; and with the bailout, we not only failed to sweep away the bad actors but kept them in place so that they may continue to leech off us. As we continue to blame the loss of the laws for the corruption, we lose sight of the true problem, that the state stacks the deck against us, because now we 'rest in the comfort' that if the state were there, it would have 'saved us', when it's part and parcel of screwing us, all along.

If the two options available are 'post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy' and 'more catastrophic financial crises', I'll take the fallacy, thanks.

It would be a fallacy if the only connection between the events were timing with no reason to suspect a causative link. Claiming that talking movies caused the Great Depression would be an example of post hoc ergo propter hoc.

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