La Trahison du...peuple?

I am prompted to write this by a recent post by Professor Eoin O'Dell, for whom I have considerable respect.

Notwithstanding that respect, we have many disagreements. For our latest, see the comment I made to the said recent post.

The issue is linked to the on-going discussion about how we in Ireland got ourselves into our current economic mess. Many commentators believe that a)there are identifiable culprits (many of whom are criminally liable), and b)all are members of the property developer, political, higher civil servant, financial regulator, banker or estate agent classes. (I propose to restrict myself in this post to the domestic targets - I may discuss the foreign scapegoats another time). I have even heard bankers, property developers and estate agents express the view that their own excesses should have been prevented by one or more of the other groups.

The link I see is this: both narratives posit that Irish adults cannot discover value or its absence without top-down guidance.

Supposedly, property buyers cannot divine, unassisted, that properties selling at 30 times annual rental value - the multiple reached much crazier levels in the supposedly more sophisticated areas - are over-priced and/or that there are times in every market when the market price is a signal not to buy. Similarly, clients of lawyers are allegedly incapable of understanding that a charge of €300 per hour to handle a straightforward probate matter is an offer which should be refused.

It is not that I don't see a real problem. There is a thorough-going failure of society here. Even property investors with millions at stake and bankers with billions at risk, to my personal knowledge, still resist the notion, ignorance of which has cost all of us so dear, that capital values of property relate to other variables such as market rent levels and trends.

And, though it is sometimes exaggerated, there is considerable reluctance among end-users of legal services - even ones who are otherwise sophisticated - to adopt a rational approach to selecting and paying their lawyers.

I suppose that another variety of the same thing is the commonplace reaction to reports that petrol station A is charging 10 cents per litre less than petrol station B: "B is a price-gouger", it will be said. The next day, or sooner, the same people will say of a report that stations C and D charge exactly the same price that it is clear evidence of illegal collusion.

Along the same lines, one constantly encounters people who bitterly complain that Tesco will not reduce their prices - all of them - to the same level as Lidl or Aldi, but who will not actually switch their custom from the former to the latter. (Yes, I know that for some, it is not an available option. And, one must exclude those who will not patronise Aldi or Lidl because they are "full of immigrants".)

How to characterise this ? "Irrational" seems too mild. Is "juvenile" too harsh ?

Whatever, it seems to me that the answer cannot be for government to attempt to put "crutches" in place so that adults are protected from their refusal/failure to use their brains when buying legal or financial services. Apart from anything else, recent experience has confirmed that the people who will be implementing such measures are no better at using their brains than the rest of us.

(None of that means that I oppose all regulation of the financial or legal services markets, and I do not.)