> You’re going to federalise house pricing? And again, you’re depending on commonsensical bureaucracy. That’s a losing move. Especially when rules-based systems are available. Put another way: if you empowered such a panel, there would be political opportunity in using its own rules to re-orient its mission.

It is if we take a defeatist attitude. Would you be saying the same thing if you knew it was the founding fathers who were going to be writing the laws or if it was Abraham Lincoln in charge? At some point in time, everyone just decided to get completely defeatist about politics and what is possible to achieve and nothing will change until that attitude is overcome.

As societies, we’ve become weirdly tolerant of deception and corruption - I assume as a result of the financial crisis and lack of punishment for those involved. Personally, I think the only antidote is to start getting really fucking tough on white collar crime - and that means long jail sentences for offenders. We also need to start rooting out all the nonsense we’ve allowed to creep into the system and stop allowing people to exploit technicalities that fly in the spirit of the law for their own personal gain. Maybe this means expanding the laws as written to include stated aims of the written law to allow for easier interpretation by juries in disputed cases. At the minute, we just allow people to exploit loopholes and shrug our shoulders saying “fair enough” when everyone can see plain as day that the spirit of the law is being flouted even if it is technically legal. Im not saying people should be jailed for this kind of behaviour like they should if they’re outright engaging in fraud, but we definitely should not be ruling in their favour.

Also I’m in the UK, not the US. The same problem exists in all English speaking countries.