the ghost of iceberg past

I just found an old post of mine-- okay it's not that old, but old enough that I didn't recognize the authorship as my own until I reached the end of the post.

"...Governments shouldn't attempt to regulate markets because they cannot. To the extent that they try to, they exaberate the problem on hand, and must seek to correct their earlier correction.

Secondarily, governments shouldn't attempt to "correct" markets, because to say a market has failed is a normative statement, and cannot be proven. In fact, the market is never "right" nor "wrong", as all a market consists of is billions of individuals trading property rights, and who is to say what two or more consenting adults agree to is incorrect?

Last, it's actually a joke to think that government "regulate" a market, because only markets can regulate themselves. The "regulation" that the government deems to provide is a poor substitute, and in fact in most times the regulatory bodies are captured by the special interests themselves, in a process known as regulatory capture. That's why our energy and telecommunication sector lags behind the world, and the biggest firms within that field are typically those that were granted monopolies by the same regulatory crew. And to think you call that "regulation".

As for suggesting that Wal-Mart must take their business elsewhere is to say that government has the right to dictate when, where and which private individuals are permitted to exchange goods. They are not "free" to take their business anywhere, as the word free implies that they have an un-interfered choice. Otherwise it is like saying that a person being mugged is "free" to choose his money or his life.

As for empirical observations, they are invalid as far as economic theory is concerned, since it is impossible to control for every variable. Economic theory can only be deduced from a axiomatic, a priori logic. To the extent that your observational data differs from theory, you must either admit that your data is incomplete or simply wrong."