Airplane crashes and financial crashes

Great points; thanks for making them. Muirgeo does not understand it, but he is setting up the perfect openings for you to make your points with ever greater clarity to anyone interested in reason and evidence (not muirgeo, judging from his comments).

OK – in response to your question below:

I think (a.) is wholly grammatically accurate, and I’d expect people to point out “but that was a fairly paltry deregulation”. A regulation of the market has been eliminated, therefore there has been deregulation in the market, but the market is not deregulated.

I think (b.) is true and POTENTIALLY misleading if you think the public is dumb as a post. As per my response to (a.), deregulation is an act that has been performed upon the market. Another example: “Joey kicked the ball”, and “the ball has been kicked”. Perfectly acceptable. Now, I say it’s “potentially” misleading because “deregulated” is both an adjective and a past tense verb. In this case it is clearly a past tense verb. If the public is as dumb as a post, they MAY think it is an adjective. But their misunderstanding does not make it inaccurate. I think this is very unlikely. Anyone who actually thinks there are no regulations in the American economy probably isn’t going to be engaging in a discussion about the American economy. Essentially, if you know the definition of “regulation”, you’re probably intelligent enough to know that there are regulations. You have to assume a great deal of stupidity on the part of listeners to argue that they’d be confused about this.

As for (c.) – I think “the market was deregulated” in this sentence is accurate for the same reason I thought (b.) was accurate. The rest of the sentence has absolutely nothing to do with word choice anymore – it’s horrendous analysis and should be criticized on that basis. I don’t see how that extremely poorly reasoned argument has anything to do with accurate word choice. It’s a logical fallacy not a grammatical or linguistic fallacy.

I also want to comment on this statement: “I hold statement “b” to be both false and misleading, because a market cannot be regulated and deregulated at the same time.”

I don’t think that is what (b.) is saying. The market “is” regulated, but it “has been” deregulated. “Deregulated” is an action that has been performed on it in the past, “regulated” is a word that currently describes the market.

As for your “-ate” endings, I’m not sure why “-ate” and “-tion” implies what you’re saying it implies. Another example you guys like: liberate – to free someone. Let’s say you were being held prisoner in a foreign country and the Marines came and broke you out – they “liberated” you. But obviously that doesn’t mean you have complete freedom. You still end up back in the U.S. where you’ve gotta pay taxes and follow all these nasty regulations. You were “liberated” but you weren’t completely “liberated”. There is an implied delimitation as to what you were liberated from, and nobody is dumb enough to here “MichaelSmith was liberated by the Marines today” and think “wow that’s sweet – he’s completely free he doesn’t have to pay taxes anymore!”. No. It’s understood there’s a limited sense in which he is liberated, just like it’s understood that there’s a limited sense in which the market is deregulated.

Correct, I would not consider it legitimate to describe a still-regulated market with the unmodified term, “deregulated”. “Partially deregulated”? Yes. “Largely deregulated”? Perhaps, depending on the extent of the regulations still in place.

But if “deregulated” means any market that has had any amount of regulations removed, then this would mean that a market with 10% of its regulations removed, one with 50% of its regulations removed, and one with 100% of its regulations removed, would all qualify as “deregulated”. Used thusly, “deregulated” can refer to everything from actual laissez-faire markets to those still laboring under heavy regulation — which effectively renders the term meaningless.

The only thing this sort of usage of the term “deregulated” accomplishes is that it permits statists to point to the failures of the still-heavily-regulated “deregulated” markets and claim that such failures prove that capitalism has failed, laissez-faire doesn’t work, etc — which is precisely what muirgeo did at the start of this discussion.

But the simple fact is that the failure of a regulated market proves nothing about the free market.

I’ll offer one more analogy. A man is known to be addicted to both alcohol and cocaine; he enters a detoxification program. He emerges a few weeks later and tells you, “I’m detoxed!” But in fact, he’s still using cocaine.

Was his description of his condition as “detoxed” accurate and honest? No — the most he can honestly claim is to have been partially detoxed. And if the man dies of a cocaine overdose the next day, are you going to buy the argument that his death was caused by the “detoxification”. No!

Yet this is precisely what muirgeo and other leftists are doing regarding the financial crises. Our financial markets are being made sick by regulations. Along the way a few regulations are dropped and the market is declared “detoxed”. But also along the way, the remaining regulations — such as the laws against discrimination in lending — begin to be enforced much more stringently, which makes the market much, much sicker, maybe even terminally sick. And what does the left blame? The “detoxification”!

Such is what comes from letting the left destroy the meaning of words.

DK wrote:

OK – but now we’re jumbling adjectives and verbs. I was talking about “regulation”.

Everything I said about the adjective applies to the verb as well.

You said that the verb “to deregulate” means removing all regulations. That’s the point I was disagreeing with initially.

Yes, and I’ve shown why: to “deregulate” is to produce a “deregulated” market — and a market cannot be “deregulated” and “regulated” at the same time.

But you’ve not addressed anything I’ve written — you’ve just tried to maintain that “deregulation” can be a process that leaves regulation in place.

And so you offer this formulation:

Of course an administration can pursue a policy of “deregulation” and still come out with a “regulated” market that is less “regulated” than the former market. In that sense the market is definitely still “regulated” but you also still have an instance of “deregulation”.

So let me try one more time. Your statement above is like saying:

Of course an administration can pursue a policy of “deactivation” and still come out with an “activated” bomb that is less “activated” than before. In that sense the bomb is definitely still “activated” but you also have an instance of “deactivation”.

When the bomb blows up, are you still going to maintain that this was an instance of “deactivation” — or are you going to agree that all that can accurately be said is that this was an instance of “partial deactivation” or “incomplete deactivation”?

An “instance” of “deregulation” that leaves a market “regulated” is a contradiction in terms — unless one adds some sort of qualifier — such as “partial” — to indicate clearly that this instance of “deregulation” has a meaning different than a “deregulation” that produces a truly deregulated, laissez-faire market.

Using the term “deregulation” without such a qualifier will mean that a market that has been made laissez-faire and a market that is still almost totally controlled can both held out as examples of “deregulation” — which means, that the failures and problems of the still-highly-controlled market can be used as an indictment of laissez-faire on the grounds that “deregulation” has been shown not to work.

The more honest term to use in these cases of “partial deregulation” is to simply describe it as “slightly/somewhat/significantly reduced regulation” — while being prepared to defend the adverb of your choice. That expression leaves no grounds for misrepresentation of what has been done, and no way to blame laissez-faire for problems in markets that are still highly regulated.

It would certainly appear that you don’t actually read what I write, at least not very carefully — otherwise, you’d see that I’ve already addressed a question you just asked:

So let me ask the question this way: if an administration were to embrace a policy that reduced the burden of regulations by two thirds but did not entirely eliminate regulations, what VERB would you use to describe that? You claim to think that “deregulation” is inappropriate – would you call the reduction of regulation an act of “regulation”?

As I said in my last comment:

The more honest term to use in these cases of “partial deregulation” is to simply describe it as “slightly/somewhat/significantly reduced regulation” — while being prepared to defend the adverb of your choice. That expression leaves no grounds for misrepresentation of what has been done, and no way to blame laissez-faire for problems in markets that are still highly regulated.

So no, I wouldn’t call a policy of “2/3 deregulation” “regulation“ — I‘d either call it a policy of “significantly reduced regulation“ or I‘d call it a policy of “2/3 deregulation“

As I’ve said over and over in these comments — which you evidently have not comprehended — it is not the use of the term “deregulation” that is “inappropriate”, it is the failure to include a modifier to distinguish between the cases of 1% repeal of regulations versus 50% or 100% repeal of regulations. It is the attempt to hold all three of those cases as equally valid examples of “deregulation” that is inappropriate.

What’s more, I’ve repeatedly noted the problems the absence of such a modifier generates — another fact which seems to have eluded you.

As to the example I chose, I selected that one because it involves the same set of suffixes and the same prefix applied to a root, namely “-ate” (going from active to activate is like going from regular to regulate), “-ed” (going from activate to activated is like going from regulate to regulated) and “de-” (going from activated to deactivated is like going from regulated to deregulated).

So, no, I didn’t specifically choose a “dichotomous” term, I chose a term that is grammatically treated the same way. I did consider the fact that “activated” and “deactivated” are bimodal in nature — but so are “regulated“ and “deregulated“; just as a bomb can either explode or not — which are the two states to which the terms “activated” and “deactivated” refer — so a market is either regulated or not, which is the two states referred to by “regulated” and “deregulated”.

As for your point that, unlike “activation”, there are intermediate states of regulation, that fact supports my case — as your “downgraded bomb” example illustrates.

Yes, I’d agree that when you are talking about a bomb whose destructive power has been reduced — but not eliminated — “downgraded“ would be accurate — it would fool no one into thinking that the bomb could no longer explode — while “deactivate” would be wholly misleading.

Likewise, when we are talking about a market whose regulations have been reduced — but not eliminated — we should use a comparable term to “downgraded” as opposed to “deregulated” — precisely because using the term “deregulated“ to refer to a market that is still regulated is wholly misleading.

This is not a semantics game to me. The very fallacy that I’ve been addressing in these comments was committed in “muirgeo’s” first comment in this thread when he alluded to the financial problems stemming from our “deregulated banks”. In my view, to refer to the U.S. banking system at present as “deregulated” — or to hold out what has been done to the banking industry as “deregulation” — is simply preposterous, and can lead to nothing but confusion and fallacious arguments aimed at discrediting laissez-faire.

DK, while you are thinking about this issue, consider this question:

Suppose we have a market to which government has applied 3 regulations:

1) Every business owner must purchase a business license from the government at a price of $100 every year.

2) Every business owner must pay all his employees time and a half for all work done in excess of 40 hours in a week.

3) All products sold in this market must be sold at the same, fixed price set by the government, with the government free to change this price at any time, up to and including weekly or daily changes.

So we have three regulations in this market. How would you evaluate the following statements, made to a public that is not versed in the details of this market’s regulation:

a) Regulation “1″ is lifted and then public is told, “Deregulation has occurred in this market.”

b) Regulation 1 is lifted, and the public is told, “This market has been deregulated.”

c) Regulations 1 & 2 have been lifted, and after 6 months the public is told, “This market was deregulated and it is still racked with problems, therefore deregulation has been shown not to work.

I hold that “a” is misleading, because anyone who knows the details of this market will realize that regulation “1″ is economically trivial, and therefore its removal is irrelevant. I realize that you are trying to make the case that statement “1″ is accurate — and that that is the very issue we are debating — but I’m just wondering whether you will also defend it as not being misleading.

I hold statement “b” to be both false and misleading, because a market cannot be regulated and deregulated at the same time.

I hold statement “c” to be both wrong and intellectually dishonest. To remove regulations that one knows to be economically irrelevant while leaving intact a regulation as draconian as total government price controls — and then conclude that “deregulation doesn’t work” — is indefensible.

According to your interpretation, however, that statement is accurate. Do you also hold it to be not misleading and not dishonest.

Just curious as to your interpretations.

By the way, in my last comment where I noted the common prefixes and suffixes used in the example of “activated” and “deactivated” versus “regulated” and “deregulated”, I forgot to note that they also obviously share the suffix “-ion”. Just an oversight on my part. No intention to avoid a comparison of the meaning of “deactivation” versus “deregulation”.

See my answer above soon – this is getting thin. Very interesting framing of the question!