Reply #36: "he wants MORE regulation of wall street" Ron Paul?

[ProSense]

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PAUL: That’s a really important issue. That’s what always happens. That’s more or less what they said in the Thirties. We had inflation in the Twenties, then the collapse of the financial bubble, and then the depression. But they said, “If only we had had a lot more regulation . . . ” So they added regulations and prolonged our depression. I think it was when Long-Term Capital failed, Sarbanes-Oxley came in and said we needed more regulations. We already had the Securities Exchange Commission and everything else, but they wanted more. And many companies went along with it.

I see the opposite. I see the arbitrary regulations of government as a major cause of our problems. Many people ask me, “If you’re not for regulations, how do you control things?” Well, in the marketplace, there are a lot of market regulations — and you don’t have the moral hazard of a government guarantee. If you mess up, you go bankrupt. In free-market banking, for instance, the directors who set up the bank would be personally liable if it went bankrupt. Can you imagine how much more cautious they would be? They wouldn’t be making all these wild loans and responding to the regulators saying you must make certain bad loans to people who don’t qualify.

So regulations are very negative when they come from government. What we need are more private-property regulations, more market regulations. So far, we’re doing exactly the wrong thing. We had the recession come because of too much spending, too much debt, too much taxing, and too much regulation. And so we’re trying to solve the problem by spending like crazy, regulating like crazy, printing money like crazy, and taxing. And then they wonder why things are getting worse.

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The only reason Ron Paul supported an audit of the Fed is because he hates government.