Our financial markets are not in need of regulation. They are in need of cutting out the fundamental source of problems in credit markets such as the formation of asset bubbles, the driving of herd behavior, and moral hazard problems, which is the ability of the Federal Reserve to fix interst rates in the market and manipulate money and credit with complete discretion. (With particular focus on interest fixation, although changes in credit supply obviously affect interst rates.) The vast majority of economists on all sides agree that price fixation by the government never works and causes all kinds of distortions. Why should we expect price fixation in financial markets to work any differently when it clearly doesn't, and the cosequences are much worse than those yielded by inefficiency in other markets?

What Clinton is calling for in her mortgage bailout and regulatory plans (and, to lesser extend, what Obama is calling for in his plans) IS socialized risk. Her plan effectively amounts to bailouts for those who lose their homes regardless of credit history: in other words, if take on a lot of risk or take on loans that you can't afford or don't take steps to make sure you afford, the government will be there to bail you out. This, with her proposed moratorium on foreclosures, is suicide and is going to impose a huge risk for lenders. Regulation will only increase costs. (Sarbanes-Oxley, according to some estimates I've read, has cost the US economy $1 trillion and increased expenditures associated with being public by over 130%. The internal control test required by SoX is a tremendous joke.) If we want to prevent shenanigans from happening, we should have a good litigation system with stronger enforcement of contracts and massive liability established (hell, I'm against limited liability for corporations) to provide disincentives to do so.

I would say that what we have right now in health care IS a socialized system. The federal tax expenditure for employer-provided care (be it employer tax exemption for provision of benefits for tax benefits for consumers for joining employer pools) is in the hundreds of billions of dollars. (The last statistic I saw, it was over $450 billion in 2004. I'm sure it's vastly more than that now.) I personally would blame this alone for most of the problems in our health care system. This all started as most socialistic boondoggles do: as the result of previous socialistic boondoggle that created a huge problem for which another socialistic boondoggle was devised to resolve. I'm talking, of course, about the FDR Administrations price and wage controls of the early 40s, which they discovered was hampering employment. So what was the answer? Provide massive tax benefits for provision of health benefits and insurance. This has led to creation of monster bureaucracy, fractured the consumer-provided insurance market, made the principal-agent problems that naturally arises with third-party provision of health coverage MUCH worse, created this idiotic coupling of employment and access to health insurance. But hey! We got employment to temporarily go up!

Furthermore, Medicare and Medicaid comprise a higher percentage of GDP than most entire single-payer systems in other countries. Combining the tax expenditure for employer-provided care raises that figure tons. The federal government is directly responsible for the creation of those HMOs. We have assinine regulations such as the prevention from buying insurance across state lines (kudos to Biden for calling this out), monopoly power of Med School accredation by the AMA, regulations keeping alternative medicine either out of the market or punishing it relative to pharmaceuticals, idiotic drug patenting laws, the shutting out of Nurse Practitioners, and benefit mandates that have increased expected payouts and wasteful expenditures that are increasing costs.

I would prefer outstanding care for the vast majority of society, into which anyone can enter, to mediocre care for everyone. I think we can get there through a true free market medicine system where health insurance that truly INSURES (i.e., covers for bad outcomes, not expenditures for routine visits and procedures) and where people have the incentives to act in ways to improve their health and minimize risk. I wouldn't mind having some type of program set up to fund, say, vouchers for the uninsured who can't afford REAL insurance with a negative health externalities tax. (For example, a cigarette tax.) In my view, this would be a way of enforcing compensation of damages to others' private property.

I know he didn't MEAN it to be a gay slur. But what he meant really isn't always the point. He didn't mean to decimate the mental health system in North Carolina, but the effect is there for all to see. He didn't mean to break the law by telling his staff to destroy emails, but the erosion of trust in government is there for all to see. He didn't mean to ridicule gays, but I have three gay friends who found his "meaninglessness" offensive and out of line.

You win. He didn't mean anything. He was just being a dumb ass.