Rules to Live By
Sorry that it has been so long since my last blog, but sometimes it’s better just to shut up.
My mother always told me, “don’t make rules that you don’t intend to follow.” This was great advice when I was raising three children. If the truth be known I didn’t always follow that advice as well as I should have..
My brother likes to say, “you can’t legislate morality.”
My mother was a crazy liberal and my brother is a flaming conservative. I have found both insightful when it comes to their life mantras.
We seem to be in a time when everyone is trying to make rules in order that someone else doesn’t get an advantage over them. What ever happened to “turning the other cheek?” We make rules in all walks of life, that we can’t enforce. We try to plug every hole with another rule.
I have no answer to this problem but I think we should all look at it as a problem
When I was in intercollegiate athletics there was a movement to reduce the regulations in the NCAA. After much debate, ringing of hands and outright anger the NCAA manual became thicker and grew from an 5 by 8 inch book to a 8 by 10 inch monstrosity. Unfortunately the schools and coaches who wanted to cheat… did so with impunity. Most of them were the large well know schools or the coaches on their way to the stars. You know… the ones too big to fail.
I am now in finance and once again people are screaming for more rules and regulations. That has REALLY worked in the past. I work at a relatively small credit union and we have been besieged by auditors because we are doing too well and growing too fast. Where were these auditors a year ago when the big banks… you know… the one too big to fail… manipulated the system to work to their advantage… believe me no matter how well my credit union is doing I don’t have a million dollar parachute for my retirement years (which have come and gone).
Regulations don’t make us more honest, fair or concerned about our brothers and sisters, only our commitment to being a decent human as has been described by Christ, Mohammed, Budha and other GOOD people in our human history.
Thank you for this post! It seems that in this case new regulations are simply pacifiers that government and government agencies are creating to let the public know that they are addressing the problem. In my view the main problem is that an ever-changing regulatory environment confuses the marketplace. Imagine playing a basketball game that has the rules change during every timeout. By the end of the game no one would know who legitimately won the game, and every fan would be asking for their money back. Free (even “free-er”) markets allow consumers to decide between good deals and bad deals, and decide with their wallets. They can still make that choice in this marketplace, I guess, but they darn sure don’t know for sure if they picked the right team.
Thanks, CU Warrior, for your response. I must say that I am not a huge “free market” proponent. After all, didn’t free markets bring us Enron, Standard Oil, and all the “too big to fail” businesses.
What I would like to see is a “transparent market” and I don’t believe there are enough honest people in the world to make this work. I hate closed doors, closed meetings and closed minds.
There I go again, letting the hippie out of my closet.