Marty Whitman on government and the "free" markets taken from Wikipedia

He argues, in particular, for the value of government-provided credit and of carefully crafted tax laws.^[2] Further, Whitman argues (explicitly against Hayek) that "a free market situation is probably also doomed to failure if there exist control persons who are not subject to external disciplines imposed by various forces over and above competition." The lack of these disciplines, says Whitman, lead to "1. Very exorbitant levels of executive compensation… 2. Poorly financed businesses with strong prospects for money defaults on credit instruments… 3. Speculative bubbles… 4. Tendency for industry competition to evolve into monopolies and oligopolies… 5. Corruption." For all of these he provides recent examples from the U.S. economy, which he considers to be in some respects under-regulated,^[3], although in other respects over-regulated (he is generally opposed to Sarbanes-Oxley ).^[4]