The economy is made up of real people

[pmb]

It turns out that unemployment is not funemployment for most people. For every percent increase in unemployment, 47,000 people die [1]. This is very very bad. This means that the increase from the 2006 low of 4.6 percent[2] to the current rate of 8.1 percent [3] our economy has killed more than 150,000 people. And the most optimistic economists

Comments

[clipdude]

I totally agree. But I think we should also demand another provision: regulatory barriers to prevent any company from ever again becoming “too big to fail”. Allow me to quote at length Rep. John Campbell (R-California):AIG made some dumb decisions, and in a normal thing, they fail. They fail, the stockholders lose their money, everybody loses their job, nobody gets their bonuses. Same thing with Lehman and the rest of these. But because of this interconnectivity part, [. . .] because if AIG goes down, probably many other banks-not just in the United States, but worldwide, big ones, big people-go down as well, which starts to bring down some others, and that’s what this “too big” or “too interconnected to fail” [means].

And I think what we want to get to [. . .] is, well, we don’t want anything that’s too big to fail. Because then, by definition, we can’t let it fail, which means the people running that company will make decisions knowing they can’t fail, and if you know you can’t fail, you’ll make a lot of bad decisions.
No company should be allowed to be “too big to fail” for the same reason that we don’t let individuals own nuclear bombs.

[boojum]

It's becoming increasingly common knowledge in industry that if you have someone who is absolutely indispensible, then you should fire them immediately. (Or, for the timid, send them on a series of vacations so the company can gain competence without fear of losing them entirely. Phone- and email-less vacations.)

A friend of mine pointed out that the difference between "too big to fail" and "too important for us to allow any monopoly-breaking competition" is pretty slim.