> Eubulides wrote:
>
> >
> >----- Original Message -----
> >From: "Brad DeLong" <delong at econ.Berkeley.EDU>
> >
> >> >Governors are about governments, which can't be trusted, since they
> >> >have their own interests, unlike juries, which dissolve upon
> >> >delivering a verdict. Ralph doesn't seem to believe that agents can
> >> >be trusted or that it's possible for principals to discipline them.
> >> >You could call his POV anarchism, but I suspect there are a lot of
> >> >people at George Mason that would agree with him.
> >> >
> >> >Doug
> >>
> >> To rely on personal-injury lawsuits as your *only* tool of governing
> >> the market seems... absurd... like something that only a
> >> narrow-minded and unobservant lawyer could entertain for a second as
> >> a desirable mode of social organization.
> >>
> >> It leads straight to something one might call right-wing corporate
> >> libertarianism...
> >>
> >>
> >> Brad DeLong
> >
> >
> >================
> >
> >You really like strawmen don't you?
>
> This is hardly a straw-man version of Ralph. He's hostile to
> regulatory agencies because he thinks they inevitably get captured.
> He prefers lawsuits for just the reason I cited - because juries are
> self-dissolving bodies. He & his raiders contributed a lot to the
> political energy behind dereg in the 1970s because of their critiques
> of the ICC etc. He has a lot in common with the corporate
> libertarians. It's too bad his early-1960s attack on public housing
> has disappeared from the web - it was a beaut.
>
> Doug
=================
Well, just think of RN as the consummate defender of neoclassical consumer choice theory. :-)
To claim that he thinks personal-injury lawsuits are the *only* way to tame the markets is ludicrous if one spends even 5 minutes actually talking with him. The problems of construing the issues he's dealt with with the same old regulation/deregulation binary folks take for granted is too simplistic and you know that from the discussions on pen-l.
http://regenerationtv.net/pipermail/actionladiscuss/2001-January/000025.html [doesn't read like 'deregulation' to me]
http://financialservices.house.gov/banking/61500nad.htm [shows the problems of thinking in terms of the deregulation/regulation binary]
The guy's no saint but he's done more for the US public than Brad'll do in 50 lifetimes.
Did I mention that he thinks corporations are undemocratic tyrannies? How's that like the folks at the Cato Institute?
Ian