Sure. Under laissez-faire, there are no preventive laws. That means no regulation--zero--only punishment for violations of the law that have occurred (or where there is a "clear and present danger"). It's "management by results," so to speak.
Regulations are immoral because they subject to state coercion people who have done nothing wrong. Regulation says: "Satisfy us that you won't do something wrong."
Your underlying premise is stealing, cheating, & deceiving people is not wrong, it's the strong winning and the weak losing. The majority of humans on the planet do not operate on this underlying moral foundation.
The financial crisis shows the absolute failure of the regulatory state.
Your illogic here is that because regulations weren't strong enough, and enforcement was lax, that somehow the solution is even less regulation.
The private interested parties exert millions of dollars worth of political influence to defeat regulations or their enforcement, which results in one disaster after another.
Your premise is false that somehow this would all cease if markets were even less regulated. The problem is Bush let the regulatory system, which had already been chipped away at, totally disintegrate.
Banking and insurance--the focus of the failure--are the most highly regulated industries.
Laissez-faire doesn't have this problem, because there is no Federal Reserve, no Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, no government pushing banks to loan for "the ownership society."
Your scenario is pure fantasy. With even less regulation we'd go back to the days of peasant uprisings every few decades or so.
In short, we Objectivists see the financial crisis as caused by government intervention. Lots of it. Tons of it. (Over 50,000 new regulations were imposed in the 12 years prior to the crisis, according to the Competitive Enterprise Institute.) The Fed (which wouldn't exist under laissez-faire) held interest rates too low too long; the extra money was channeled into housing by Fannie and Freddie.
Always the claim someone/thing prevents Rand's true philosophy of working. And never the true self assessment that human nature is poorly accounted for in Rand's philosophy. She falls short of recognizing we are a heterogeneous, not a homologous species. And Objectivist underlying premises simply don't match reality.
I said somewhere in one of these discussions of Rand, garbage in garbage out. Her assessment of human nature was so poorly done, her conclusions based on that assessment were grossly flawed.
It's interesting the very thing Rand rated about, the philosophy of communism, was just as ignorantly based on a very poor assessment of basic human nature. Rand's philosophy amounts to a philosophy applied to an imaginary world. In the real world, because of the erroneous underlying premises, Objectivism does not work.
You cannot remove the part of human nature which leads to people exerting influence on government, except in lala land. You cannot take all government out of the business world except in lala land. So what results is some imaginary belief that the more you deregulate, the closer you get to Rand's imaginary world.
But that isn't what happens because lala land is not real. The more you deregulate, the worse things get. Bush's 8 years demonstrates that fact unequivocally. If less regulation was better, we should have seen major advances in the economy during Bush's term. Instead, the economy tanked. Corporations got more and more inventive in how to cheat people.
When the Libertarians and/or Objectivists look at the data, they ignore the evidence that less regulation made things even worse, and fall back on the illogical claim government intervened even more.
How are regulatory agencies supposed to prevent it? How come the SEC though informed about Bernie Madoff repeatedly, with documentation, by Harry Markopoulis, didn't lift a finger?
If you read Markopolos' book, "
No One Would Listen", or heard the author's story, you would know how Bush's gutting of enforcement of regulations in order to nullify the laws Bush didn't agree with Congress on, led to the conditions which resulted in no one listening. The SEC turned a deaf ear to Markopolos. You try to discredit Greenspan's idealizing Objectivism. But by his own admission his idealizing of Rand's ideas resulted in a false assumption by Greenspan that market forces were sufficient, and regulations had a negative impact.
How on Earth would no regulations have stopped Madoff? It's not like you can point to any market forces that would have stopped him and some regulation that didn't.
Under laissez-faire, it's investor beware. There's no SEC, no governmentally imposed reporting requirements, no FDIC, etc. Today's regulatory agencies give the investor a false sense of security, while also hamstringing financiers. The paperwork requirements are very expensive in time and money, and their are all kind of restrictions on perfectly proper deals.
I doubt eliminating that "false sense of security" would have any impact whatsoever on people's abilities to cheat other people, especially the ability of the rich and powerful to cheat and steal from those not as well off.
In Rand's view the weak and poor steal from the rich. It's ludicrous. Her view clearly results from her narrow experience as a young person where a revolution affected the economic status she was born into.
Many relatives altruistically contributed to Rand's getting to the US, establishing a life here, and getting her initial breaks as a writer. She never admitted (probably not even to herself) that she did not become successful entirely on her own. Numerous people gave her things, at a cost to themselves, that were never repaid.
It all comes down to your false underlying premise that in the real world all you need do is [X] and everything will work. It's unrealistic.
