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Stefan did a video a while back talking about how ineffective government oversight of the financial sector was. I remember, in particular, he had great facts about how much porn the regulators who were supposed to be watching the banks were downloading and watching (when they should have been watching the banks). I tried to find the video, but I can't seem to find it. Does anyone know what it's called?

So there's this documentary series coming out, and for the next few days you can view it online for free. It's basic thing is that it's pro-alternative medicine treatments for cancer and against the pharmaceutical industry in general. However, I've watched the first half of the first (two hour long) episode, and there's some interesting tidbits on government involvement in the creation of the current medical industry. I thought some others here might find it kind of interesting. https://go.thetruthaboutcancer.com/?

Here is an article by Robert Kuttner. Have at it. http://prospect.org/article/libertarian-delusion

(This is my first post ) Deregulation/non state enforced regulation is one of the many beauties of anarchism however it is a common misconception that sate enforced regulations are a necessary evil to protect vulnerable customers/small businesses. I was speaking to my dad (who runs a small but successful insurance brokers) about deregulation and he gave me quite a wonderful example of how the free market solved a potentially serious problem. Scenario: A insurance broker who is a con man and has the aim of taking the money from the clients telling them they are insured and then runs off with the money. Thus the insurance companies would not have been paid, thus the clients would have no insurance and a empty pocket. With regulations: A rule book has been put in place and is enforced by law, this rule book is of considerable length and written by lawyers who although have an in depth understanding of law understand very little in regards to how businesses in the insurance industry operate. The cost of this regulation to the government is recouped via the insurance brokers themselves. This rule book among other things limits the type of account that the clients money can be put in before transferring it to the insurance company making it harder to steal. The problem with this regulation like many others is there are loop holes or at least ways of getting round them if you put your mind to it and they are costly to enforce. The way I have worded it sounds as if this regulation is easy to follow but I can assure you it is not, it is time consuming slowing the whole process down considerably and legal advice was required when the regulation was implemented. Regulators will do random checks which are disruptive and time consuming. Without regulations: The insurance companies would cover the clients for the insurance they had payed the crooked broker free of charge. The insurance companies would try and get the money back from the crooked broker but this was quite often not possible. The insurance companies did this to stop the market crashing in local areas and causing a ripple affects. It was in their interest to keep the market that they rely on stable... The free market is quite often self maintaining in B2B as it is in the interest of the big companies t to keep the small companies that they rely on in good health. If you have any interesting examples/links of before and after regulation please share them here. If you are puzzled about the free market alternatives to a given regulation we could also discuss that here. Sorry if this was a bit wordy I hope someone found this of interest.

I regularly watch a very funny, informative podcast posted by some industry leaders in the mortgage and real estate industry and I just had to share today's 5 minute video! The topic is unfortunate (govt regulation always is), but presented in a hilariously funny way in a very short 5 minute video. (Link below) Basically, the CFPB (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) was created 4 years ago and is outside Congressional oversight because it is officially under the Federal Reserve. (..a whole different topic there.. but I'll keep this post more focused) So... an official report issued by the very same Federal Reserve actually states that their very own CFPB (the extra burden of complying with all the new regulation) has been responsible for holding down loan origination (driving down lending) and being the 'stick in the spokes of the industry!' WOW, thanks for the honesty FED (for once!) The new burden of compliance is estimated to have increased real estate closing costs by about 6% overall.. so the real cost to the average Joe buying a piece of real estate with a mortgage is actually 6% more (not due to inflation, just actual increase in costs) Thank you government regulation!!! (rolling eyes while shaking head) Here's the video.. highly suggest watching it for the comedy alone! http://thenationalrealestatepost.com/the-cfpb-is-the-new-herpes/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheNationalRealEstatePost+%28The+National+Real+Estate+Post%29

Being in real estate, I'm always reading industry news and I came across an article that really stood out to me and after researching more.. it turns out this isn't a novel idea. Apparently this is a growing trend in big cities like London and NYC. With prices in large cities climbing higher and higher, new housing developments are being required to include a certain percentage of 'affordable housing' options in order to get final 'planning permission.' So these upscale developers are addressing this 'problem' by adding 'alternative' side entrances for the building's lower-income residents. Often, it's not just a side alley entrance for 'poor people' but entirely separate common elements like mailboxes, garbage disposal facilities, and staircases. So this literally creates a separation of the 'affordable' housing condos from the rest of the luxury development.. so the rich people never have to accidentally run into the 'lower class' condo owners while living in the same building. My initial reaction was that this is pretty crazy and I couldn't believe these 'poor doors' were being approved by the housing authorities in these cities, but then those same authorities were the ones mandating these 'affordable' units before approving the whole project in the first place! I get that they want a diverse mix of residents in very expensive cities but this is just an example of how screwed up the Fed's inflation policies are... the rich spend their money like it's water because otherwise that money looses value through inflation, so they don't care about paying more and more for the condo units, but how do we, as a general society deal with this new 'class segregation?' Here's the article about the new condo building in NYC: http://www.newsweek.com/new-york-city-approves-poor-door-luxury-apartment-building-260218

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/20/rise-of-data-death-of-politics-evgeny-morozov-algorithmic-regulation?commentpage=2 http://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/viewProduct.do?ISBN=9780241957707 The rise of data and the death of politicsTech pioneers in the US are advocating a new data-based approach to governance – 'algorithmic regulation'. But if technology provides the answers to society's problems, what happens to governments? "To his credit, MacBride understood all of this in 1967. "Given the resources of modern technology and planning techniques," he warned, "it is really no great trick to transform even a country like ours into a smoothly running corporation where every detail of life is a mechanical function to be taken care of." MacBride's fear is O'Reilly's master plan: the government, he writes, ought to be modelled on the "lean startup" approach of Silicon Valley, which is "using data to constantly revise and tune its approach to the market". It's this very approach that Facebook has recently deployed to maximise user engagement on the site: if showing users more happy stories does the trick, so be it. Algorithmic regulation, whatever its immediate benefits, will give us a political regime where technology corporations and government bureaucrats call all the shots. The Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, in a pointed critique of cybernetics published, as it happens, roughly at the same time as The Automated State, put it best: "Society cannot give up the burden of having to decide about its own fate by sacrificing this freedom for the sake of the cybernetic regulator." spike91nz20 July 2014 7:08am Recommend6 The algorithms imagined are developed within a set of assumptions regarding relevant aspects of the system counting for significance and value. It is the assumptions within which the algorithms are constructed that are (or need to be) open for public and political debate. The algorithm is not a neutral and objective construction, but rather one tailored to the assumptions defining the purpose and design applied to the indifferent system. If the world is seen only in terms of economic values, those aspects of human existence resistant to such reductionism, and those impossible to be determined values for future generations, will be excluded by those obsessed with immediate personal profits. If we wish to establish a steady-state socio-political machine in a rentalist's economy, without opportunity for freedom or progress, then the cybernetic algorithms will serve that purpose. They will however demand ever finer constraints upon the individual variables, until the specific calories and allowable waste are calculated for each inhabitant of a maximally populated dystopian reality. Is this really the best future that we can imagine?

I've been fielding a lot of questions on my channel about "the free market" and a common retort I get is an example of Big Corporations running wild -- that is, until you consider that the only reason they have all this power is because they made a bee line for the very government institution which is supposed to protect us from such excesses... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvVVObVO59Y&list=UUmkSQppUOY6r7qd-sbcftBQ

Hi, I just came across this report on Uber, an app that allows you to treat any registered user as a paid taxi: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-06-10/uber-protests-spread-across-europe-as-taxi-app-backlash-grows.html No prizes for guessing who doesn't like it... As one person put it: "A few lines of python code toppling an entire industry"

So I was having a debate with my friend, we were talking about prostituion regulation and drug regulation. I managed to prove him wrong with statistics and reasoning towards the deregulation of prostitution, drugs, guns, etc. But then he stumped me on pollution, the sale of uranium to make nuclear weapons, and bioweapons/virus regulation. I dislike government like the next guy, but what would keep a person/organization other than governments from making nuclear weapons, bioweapons, and polluting like crazy if there were no regulation on the sale of uranium, the pollution emission, and the lab regulations to keep labs from making bioweaponry? I get that of course government makes nuclear weapons and probably bioweapons too, but I understand that governments wouldn't want to unleash that on each other because it would detrimental to the leaders (the parasites need the host to live). What would keep an evil guy or organization from building nuclear weapons/bioweapons and unleashing them on the world?

Here's an interesting short history of U.S. government involvement in medicine. I hadn't heard a lot of the stuff before. Unfortunately, I think you have to sign up for an account on Quora.com to read the whole thing, but it's free and quick and you can promote your ideals on Quora anyway. http://qr.ae/riG6X Makes me want a "The Truth About Health Care and Medicine."

I have heard the argument that there has never been a real monopoly without government involvement. However my friends have told me otherwise (although I cannot remember their exact examples), and a good friend of mine put forward the case why we need government regulation of business in order to avoid monopolies. I was wondering if you could help me evaluate his reasoning, so here goes. My friend used the example of an airline company in Norway-- which is a small country where you can fly most places within an hour on domestic flights-- in order to explain why regulation is needed. Let us say that airline company "X" does really well and becomes a really big company, and virtually drives out all competition on domestic flights. Then, my friend says, this company can charge high prices for a flight that used to be cheap. "Nonsense", I say, "then competitors will rush to the field and offer flights that are cheaper, which will attract consumers". Then my friend says that all this big powerful company has to do is to dump the prices until they drive their competitors out of business. They will be able to do this because of the surplus they have from being successful for some time. This way they can become monopolists by dumping the prices to such a low level that nobody can compete with them, whenever competition arises. When competitors again are out of the way, they can go back to their high prices. Thus, my friend says, we need government to regulate so that no company becomes big enough to do this. Have anyone encountered this "price dumping argument" for government regulation before? Or seen this happen in real life? Any good counter responses to this argument?