we can't let complex, potentially dangerous technologies and highly expensive society-changing decisions be completely entrusted to individuals and organizations whose expertise and interests are purely financial and commercial. I realize you have problems with that point of view, but to me it is second nature.

Whether or not I have problems with government oversight depends a lot on what they're looking over.

For example, I have no fundamental problem with the FDA (although in theory there might be private ways of doing this outside the actual drug industry), but I think they've gone overboard in some areas of regulation, getting way past the safety and labeling issues that should be their prime concern.

It's also obvious that I would have different opinions about the government regulating the size of holes in Swiss Cheese (they do), and regulating a 2 gigawatt atomic power plant near a city.

On the other side of your balance beam is the situation where far too much industrial and economic decision-making is happening in political arenas, by people who have little if any knowledge of the field they're controlling. It goes without saying that I have no more objective reason to totally trust a Senator or appointed bureaucrat with nuclear safety issues than I would an industrialist. Is our current nuclear waste policy really the best idea (it's not), or just the most politically workable?

Where do you find true objectivity in these things?

Where one draws the balance is the trick. Right now, I think the nuclear industry is already regulated to almost the last inch of its life, and I don't see any real showstoppers for continuing a nuclear buildup in the U.S.