Thursday, August 18, 2011
Annals of the regulatory state: Three links
The regulators are out in force, so much so that it is almost impossible to monitor their mischief.
Item: ExxonMobil discovers a bunch of oil, and the United States government seizes on a paperwork question to deprive it of the fruits of its investment. Our government does not discover or extract oil, but it loves redistributing the profits from those activities. Doing it this early in the process is a new wrinkle. More here.
Item: Eric Holder's Justice Department has decided to investigate one of the three national ratings agencies that assessed mortgage-backed securities in the years leading up to the financial crisis. You will have no problem guessing which of the three Holder decided to torture.
Item: The SEC seems to have "illegally destroyed files and documents related to thousands of early-stage investigations over the last 20 years." As even the NYT is willing to point out, "[t]he S.E.C. is the very agency that is charged with making sure that Wall Street firms retain records of their own activities, and has brought numerous enforcement cases against firms for failing to do so." Regulators think every burden on business is easy and inexpensive, until they have to do it themselves.
Release the hounds.
3 Comments:
By 
, at
Thu Aug 18, 12:29:00 PM:
If one set out with forethought to destroy the economy and build a totalitarian state out of the resulting crisis, how different would the planned events be from the actual reality we face today? Of course, I dont think that what is happening is in fact a purposeful series of events but I do believe the Progressives have such a strong totalitarian instinct that we must begin to really agitate against actions like the ones in your links lest they take advantage of the economic crisis to build their utopia.
Unbelievable, I can't believe these things are happening.
By Jim - PRS, at
Thu Aug 18, 09:46:00 PM:
The Department of Justice investigation of S&P is Stalinesque and should scare the pants off every American -- every American.
By , at
Fri Aug 19, 08:12:00 PM:
Actually, the Fact that they were not investigating S&P (and the other rating agncies) is what should concern us. How do we stop the crony capitalism?!
