Daniel Bastos wrote:
> What you mean (or what is meant) by self-regulation? Some effect of
> free trade?

Self-regulation is the notion that everybody's actions, whether through 
goodwill or pure greed (though probably assumed the latter in every 
case), balance each other out and so prevent any one particular greedy 
individual from taking unfair advantage of those who don't happen to be 
as greedy--all the greedy ones hobble each other in an attempt to keep 
everyone but themselves from getting all the money, but since there's 
more than one of them...you get a fair market.

The only problem is it doesn't turn out that way, and you do need a 
(supposedly) impartial watchdog.  That's the government.  Proponents of 
pure free trade insist that any intervention, period, breaks capitalism 
and allows things to become unbalanced, instead of recognising that the 
government just tries to reduce the disparity that'll be there anyways.

Then there's the (somewhat peculiar, imo) notion of individual liberty. 
  It was a novel thing to found an entire country holding that concept 
as sacred, the way the USA was, at the time.  It hadn't ever actually 
been tried--it was a grand experiment.  So you drill into your citizens 
that belief, and that 'the government' as an entity that since time 
immemorial had just taken freedom away from ordinary folk (along with 
nobility, but since that was explicitly left out of the USA, in theory 
doesn't affect the situation ['cept it does, 'cuz you get class 
striation, with the rich people becoming the de facto nobility]), was 
something bad.  So when you have government needing to grow and have 
bureaucracy, it bothers people.

Just my opinion.
</rant(?)>

--
Tim Cook
http://empyrean.freesitespace.net

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