Regulating the Irregulable

Barry, Timmy & Co. propose just how the government can fix what it, in fact, caused:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- President Obama will release details on Wednesday of his proposed overhaul of how the government oversees banks and financial companies.

The aim is to patch holes in the country's complex system of financial regulation.

The system "was fundamentally too fragile and unstable and it did a bad job of protecting consumers and investors," said Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who spoke at a Time Warner (TWX, Fortune 500) summit on the economy. Time Warner is the parent of CNNMoney.com.

I'm sure you don't need my opinion on this. You're going to get it anyway. The one thing, ONE STINKING THING, the government could actually regulate that would have made this a complete financial non-event is the freakin' money supply. Yet on this count it steadfastly refuses to do its job, even as it takes on new "responsibilities" that will do nothing but give the financial system a false appearance of security even as it makes things worse. This is the classic case of unintended consequences: the government attempts to achieve some desired effect by fiddling with the money supply, in reality causes an unintended catastrophe, then responds by trying to outmuscle the laws of cause and effect with yet more interventions. Can anyone take a guess as to where this is likely to end? Pathetic. This is not even a case of the perfect being the enemy of the good. It's a case of a crackhead's pipedream becoming the enemy of one of mankind's greates achievements: the the modern industrialized economy, which has lifted man out of the mire of scarcity of preceeding millenia and left the average modern wage earner living as well or better than the greatest kings of old. There is no perfect economy. Ever. This is because there are no perfect people, much less perfect populations. The economy will always be a little screwy. But a limited money supply, competitive marketplace, and that persistent, relentless enforcer of consumer sovereignty, profit-and-loss, do a far better job protecting us from the so-called "excesses of capitalism" than Timmy and his stupid accountants could ever dream of doing. Yet it is precisely these agents that Timmy & Friends insist on undermining and replacing with their own clumsy, self-deluded bureaucratic machinations that will do nothing but run this nation and its economy into the ground. Their regulations will solve nothing. Their tinkering will have no effect but to increase risk and make us all poorer. They cannot solve the problem. They are the problem.