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For the record, I was being ironic, and I thought jorgelito was too. It was a response to the idea that this crisis was caused by regulation, though it's been a while so I can't remember if it was tangential to the current discussion or not).
As someone who has alcoholics in the family (does anyone not have alcoholics in the family) it does seem ridiculous to me. Alcoholics can be exceptionally functional in some aspects of their lives and completely destructive in others-- it isn't an affliction that can be cured with the market.
Greed and shortsightedness are also afflictions that can't be cured with the market, and it seems ridiculous to me there are folks who can on the one hand see greed and shortsightedness as good things in that they drive our economy, but on the other hand can't see how greed and shortsightedness could possibly have a detrimental effect on the way people behave in the marketplace.
As far as I have been able to tell, there are no regulatins requiring banks to provide loans to people who weren't really qualified for them based on hopelessly optimistic predictions of housing market performance. There are no regulations requiring banks to cut up these loans into thousands of unrecognizable pieces and sell them to other people.
Claiming that this crisis was caused by regulation is ridiculous. This crisis was caused by people trying to do what free marketeers ought to do: make money. And they did make money, and even if the economy crashes they will still have that money, because it wasn't their money they were fucking around with, it was ours.
One problem with the free market is that sometimes one can ruin the economy and make quite a profit in the process.
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