Michael
Now I'm REALLY straying from the few areas I know anything about...
I cannot begin to give you criteria for balancing market flaws with
regulatory flaws until we establish what role regulation should play in
our lives.  Even if you are not asking me that question, I will answer
it anyway.  Governmental regulation is necessary to protect life,
justice, private property and liberty.  It may even be useful to provide
beyond those needs, if it is cost effective compared to the marketplace,
like education and infrastructure/utilities. I suppose there may be some
other duties of government, but not many more.  Beyond that, each
individual is on his/her own to protect everything else.  
If a "flawed product of markets is unquestionably inferior", believe me,
the market will correct that.  I sure wouldn't buy it, and neither would
you.  The fundamental obstacle to "perfect markets" is obtaining
accurate information.  With accurate information, wouldn't a lot of
these problems go away?  
My problem is with the "let the government take care of it" response,
which in my opinion should be the last resort, not the first choice.

TZ 

-----Original Message-----
From: Academy of Legal Studies in Business (ALSB) Talk
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Michael O'Hara
Sent: Tuesday, March 01, 2005 10:19 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Robert Reich article in NY Times

      Tom, not being an economist just means you are slightly less
likely
to be dismal.  With practice any sentient being is able to mimic those
from
the dismal science.  So you are correct to be undeterred by prior
certification in dismal, especially when rejecting that certification by
resort to the rhetorical question of lost liberty for the many via
tyranny
of the few as the answer to the question of how to address clear harm
suffered by a different(?) many.

      Reich offer up a political metric for answering your
socio-economic
question in the affirmative.  To wit: if I see my citizen self as
clearly
better off over a longer duration than I see my consumer self in an
instantaneous transaction, then the regulation of the select few is
better
than the imperfect regulation by the market's hundreds of millions.

      In short:  "Yes".

      Yes, regulation by the few is better than the market:  in this
instance from the individual perspective of that citizen.

      I believe all remotely attentive observers will agree on two
propositions.
      [1]   All governmental actions always are wrong, generating
unavoidable negative consequences and generating negative unintended
consequences of material magnitude.
      [2]   All markets always are wrong, containing unavoidable
negative
consequences and generating negative unintended consequences of material
magnitude.

      That is, there always are political special interests and the
usurpation of public tools for private gain.  That is, there always are
the
poor (i.e., willing but not able) and there always are externalities
(able
but not willing).  That is, nothing created by man works as designed.
It
always fails to reach perfection.

      With such a frequent lack of perfection one might be tempted to
craft
criteria for choosing between two bads.  Reich did.

      In 50 words or less, what criteria would you offer for when the
predictably flawed product of markets is unquestionably inferior to the
predictably flawed product of regulation, to your eyes?

      (Yes, I know, 50 words is getting verbose if we are talking about
what our students will recognize and seize as a "take away" item, but
let's
forget them for a moment and dance with the wolves of academe as they
search for glimpse of truth on the cave wall.)  (Between that pair of
parens you will find 50 words.)

Michael

Professor Michael J. O'Hara, J.D., Ph.D.
Finance, Banking, & Law Department
College of Business Administration
Roskens Hall 502
University of Nebraska at Omaha
Omaha  NE  68182
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(402) 554 - 2823 voice  fax (402) 554 - 2680
http://cba.unomaha.edu/faculty/mohara/web/ohara.htm