Or just a term to describe the process of erasing regulation laws. I get where you are coming from though and agree with that.
Let's erase the regulation and the regulators that suspended the trading in Aviva today, I'm sure the City and the Tories like a free falling market just as much as any free market.
So let me get this straight: You think that financial services are overpaid because of failed regulation by Reagan, Thatcher and co? They actually introduced neoliberalism and did the exact opposite: they killed regulation (as in de-regulation). Anyway: if those regulations you target here would in fact have caused prices to increase, then it shouldn't be to hard to recognize them, would it? Do you have such examples to back up your viewpoint?
I don't really see the impact of regulation here and also don't see where financial services are overpriced when you agree on the concept of the free market to evaluate prices. If it was indeed regulation, then it could be explained, but as I don't think that is the case, competition should in theory (don't work in finance) enable firms to make more money by offering cheaper services, so if that would be possible I don't see why they would not do it. Meaning that e contrario the pay for the services are fair on the basis of the concept of free market.
I didn't mean that individual financial services are overpriced, I meant that in general the whole financial industry costs us all money. What they earn is what we pay. That's a lot because they earn a lot, there are lots of people providing financial services of some kind and making good money doing it. I'm fine with that as long as we get good value in return, but I really don't see that value.
I don't think the financial industry makes this much money because it's the free market and they deliver value in return, I think they make this much money because regulations put them in a position of power that allows them to make this much money off other industries and off citizens. Within those regulations they have their own little market that does only a help a bit to get a good price within margins. We all pay them through inflation caused by them having the right to create money for example. If I get a mortgage from a bank, with a push on a key on the keyboard, they have just created 500.000 euro's out of thin air, and it's theirs, and I have to pay interest to that bank for lending me the money they just got for free, from all of us. That's the way it's regulated, banks can do that, I can't. And it's not free, because all savers are paying for it through inflation, it's free money only for the bank.
My guess is that if the financial industry is regulated in a sensible way, by people who want it to serve the economy as a whole and don't get millions a year to do a few speaches at their events, it would be a much smaller industry. The size of a financial sector used to be about 1% GDP, and back then people also could save (and even recieve decent interest), loan, mortgage, transfer money, get cash, and getting money to invest in a business was a lot easier. So since the 'deregulations' of Reagan, Thatcher and the rest of the world. the total service of the industry to society as in the economy as a whole has gone down while the price society pays for financial services went through the roof. With an industry that's so highly regulated and exists through regulations as a seperate industry, you can't just say that's the free market. In a free market I wouldn't accept such a bad deal.
Well one point would clearly be to limit rich individuals in influencing the population by buying an awful lot of newspapers and tell them what to write. They might still be rich and have the same base of interests but it would at least ensure some pluralism.
Of course you have to write what people want to hear but 'people' are not just 'people' - a homogenous group. In reality people want to hear very different things, there is the liberal academic that wants solid background information, there is the so called "little englander" that wants simplistic world views. The former group might contain fewer individual but could be willing to pay more etc.
That's not different for a rich individual, he can also tell them to write the same for liberal academics and little Englanders in a different way.
My experience from a country with no Murdochs is that only the media with a lot of subscribers tend to hold on to some kind of identity, but quite artificially and only in background articles. In the basic news reports and the selection of what is news and what's important news, they all let it happen, they don't really make choices, they just report what's easy to report, and if one big paper reports something, then it's news so they have to follow, the biggest papers are setting the agenda, and others and television have a free item. It's a kind of of the shelf journalism, it's more cost efficient, so we get an awful lot of American news, not because it's important, but because it's easy access. We hardly get any news from our German neighbours, because they write in difficult sentences and most journalists can't translate that without help. If choices are dictated by costs, you don't get much pluralism in reporting.
We used to have television made by about 10 non profit member associations with different religious or non-religious backgrounds, then you have pluriformity. I guess these days you have to get pluriformity from the internet.