Aren’t you yourself a testament to free market enterprise at work? While corporations gobble up and destroy newspapers the free market created an alternative medium through bloggers and the like and this will eventually be corporatized and be gobbled up until the next great thing the free market will develop.

The mantra that a free market is self-regulating is so patently false and so easy to prove false that it makes me nuts that people still chant it. Reagan started this free-market supply-side nonsense and look where it has gotten us. The money floats to the top, CEOs respond (sort of) to stockholders who want to squeeze more and more profit out of the marketplace without providing any additional value. In that world the customer is just an inconvenience at the bottom of a profit pyramid.

Try replacing your bank, insurance company, or mortgage company with a friendly little hometown institution that has no call center. Good luck. If you find such a creature, it will almost certainly be on the verge of being gobbled up by something bigger and meaner. Mergers and acquisitions are a prime tool for artificially pumping up profits, at least one paper, and that’s we have fewer and fewer competitors in the marketplace and less and less real competition in certain industries.

As to the subprime mess, the cause, as I see it, has more to do with speculative investment products created by noncommercial banks like Bear Stearns. It’s so easy and tempting to blame individual homeowners, but what really froze the market up (and continues to wreak havoc) are all the SIVs and creative investment products that chop up these bad loans so that no one can trace who holds what debt. That should indeed be regulated. Even Bernanke knows that Wall Street has figured out how to evade banking regulations and that this is the result—and he’s hardly a pinko. Those regulations were put in place after the Depression to prevent another wave of bank runs.

I really appreciate your comments though. When I can’t provoke people here in America without getting hauled off I’ll know the end is near. Thanks to forums like this, it’s not.

All the best to you.

More legislation means higher overhead for customers like me, customers who actually take the time to read and comprehend and agreement before getting into it. “This subprime mess” is a result of people engaging in greedy speculation of their own volition; they were not little victims forced into transactions from which they’ll need protection in the future from some bloated governmental body. Legislation in this context will not create market efficiencies but instead lard transactions up.

If consumers are sick of call trees, then they need to end their relationships with the companies that stick them in said call trees. That’ll learn ‘em; funny how that happens in a free market, eh?