As I see it, Nixon and Agnew were not going after total power per se, just trying to save their own sorry and corrupt asses. I am no fan of "wage and price control" Nixon. Clinton actually falls into this self-serving category too, in my opinion. His wife, on the other hand, probably wishes there was a legal way for her to become Empress.

Many Democrats in Washington believe that they have the right, if not the obligation, to control pretty much every action of every citizen in the country. For their own good of course. If they didn't feel this way, they wouldn't join that particular party. It would be interesting to go up to someone like Ted Kennedy and ask him if there was any economic activity at all that should have absolutely no input from the Federal government.

The S&L crisis, which dragged as many Democrats as Republicans into it, was caused by the massive dumping of a skip loader full of government monkey wrenches into what should ideally have been a private banking system. A short chronology of the enormous government interference in the banking system can be found here.

The short and simple answer was that the banks were massively deregulated, while at the same time maintaining the Federal insurance that insulated the banks from any screwups or market failures. This is like giving your teenager a credit card with a $100,000 limit, and then being surprised by what they do with it.

Considering the regulatory crap they had to deal with, it's astonishing the system didn't blow up earlier, and it's less than astonishing that unscrupulous types who knew how to play the mixed-economy game edged out honest bankers.