Quotes About Regulation

Governments are scared of software.

Classical economics values things by seeing how much someone will pay for them. But this is where classical economics is wrong. What it fails to account for are all the 'externalities' - the services people regard as free goods: pollination services, flood protection, climate regulation, soil stabilization, carbon sequestration.

I wish that there were more stringent laws to make guns sold anywhere that they're legal harder to get.

Every gun sold should require a background check, period.

As a condition for entry into the Chinese market, Apple had to agree to the Chinese government's censorship criteria in vetting the content of all iPhone apps available for download on devices sold in mainland China.

The major reform legislation, Dodd-Frank, was named after two guys bought and sold by special interests, and one of them should be shouldering a good amount of blame for the crisis.

I don't want to ride in a self driving car that can't drive me to a certain place because someone has bought or sold an illegal copy of something there.

The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.

Almost everything the FCC does is challenged in court. There is no clean solution because we have a Communications Act that wasn't written for broadband.

I look forward to the day when China has a truly market-determined solution... To get there, you need to have a currency that is market-determined, an open capital market, and you are going to need a competitive, open financial system.

We are now in a situation in which we will have to rely on market forces to maintain a free and open Internet. And nobody really knows whether that will work or not. One thing we do know is we didn't need to do this to ourselves. This was a solution in search of a problem.

I'm leery of legislative solutions to what is morality.

There's a simple way to solve the crime problem: obey the law; punish those who do not.

The problem we are trying to solve is that of drugs that would have never seen the light of day for reasons that have nothing to do with the inherent properties of drug candidates themselves and more to do with bureaucratic institutions within which they often sit.

I do not want to put U.S. companies in a position where their competitors are behaving in a way that is inconsistent with the way they are required to behave. That is neither fair, nor will it solve the problem.

We think it would be safer if the Bank of England had responsibility for solvency regulation of UK-based banks, as well as having an overall duty to keep the system solvent. Otherwise, there could be dangerous delays if a banking crisis did hit.

Some people need a command-and-control environment.

I'm not against censorship in principle. Not at all. Some things should be censored.

Every time you make a rule, somebody will think of a way to operate around the rule.

When your heart is broken, it's easier to follow rules

You can rigidly enforce only those laws that most people believe to be good laws, that is, laws that proscribe actions that they would avoid even in the absence of laws.

almost all professions requiring licensure, people may try to get admitted more

In part because there are so many laws to break; and the more laws there are to break, the harder it is to prevent them from being broken

We economists don't know much, but we do know how to create a shortage. If you want to create a shortage of tomatoes, for example, just pass a law that retailers can't sell tomatoes for more than two cents per pound. Instantly you'll have a tomato shortage.