Regulation !

There's a tiger-striped butterfly almost dead center in this pic, but you have to click to embiggen in order to see it... ;)

Krugman:

The ironic thing is that the Agriculture Department’s deference to the beef industry actually ended up backfiring: because potential foreign buyers didn’t trust our safety measures, beef producers spent years excluded from their most important overseas markets.

Hell, I haven't eaten beef for years. I still don't trust the chickens who're guarding that particular hen house.

But then, the same thing can be said of other cases in which the administration stood in the way of effective regulation. Most notably, the administration’s refusal to countenance any restraints on predatory lending helped prepare the ground for the subprime crisis, which has cost the financial industry far more than it ever made on overpriced loans.

Yes, it may have cost the financial industry a whole lot - which is guaranteed by the US taxpayer in fact if not on paper.

On the other hand, the individuals who made shitpiles of money on those loans are still sitting on their shitpiles of money, and there's no effort that I know of to relieve them of those shitpiles either. Corporations come and corporations go - they can die unlamented since they aren't persons. They can be fined and penalized, but unless those unethical and perhaps illegal transactions are looked into, and any persons who performed illegal acts are punished; those who are tempted to repeat their crimes in order to obtain their own shitpile of money will not be deterred.

The moral of this story is that failure to regulate effectively isn’t just bad for consumers, it’s bad for business.

And further, it's bad for the American way of life, and bad for the middle class who gets to cover all bets in the end.

full article here