There may a bit of truth in what you say about overregulation being a part of the problem, but if that was the entire case, why did we have a crash in 1929 when the lions of Wall Street had their own way about everything? Why have there been booms and busts in market economies since the Renaissance? When left to itself, finance capital is inherently unstable. It is not the same as the lonely entrepreneur making something out of nothing with nothing but the force of his will.

It's not that a free market system is stable, i.e. without booms, busts, screwups, corruption, or nerve-wracking gyrations.

It's not, and probably never will be. The best you can hope for is that the damage is isolated, and if it's decentralized enough, often it is.

But what happens is that well-meaning social engineers decide to somehow insert the government into the system to "smooth things out." The original Federal Reserve system was founded because of the panic of 1907 to make sure banks wouldn't go crazy again. That worked. For a while. I've used the term "penny in a fuse box" many times. It's as good a metaphor as any. By the time the appliances catch fire, it's a "too big to fail" problem.

It isn't about overregulation, or the wrong regulations. It's a recognition that you cannot legislate the laws of economics. That's where the discussion usually breaks down, because being able to legislate the laws of economics is the foundation of liberal economic thought.

It wouldn't suck to address the other side of the argument for a change. Most of the statements on this board fall under the "Republicans/conservatives/Bush suck" category.

Of course, the usually-unspoken corollary is that somehow if the right people were running things, this sort of thing wouldn't happen. Vote Obama, no more financial breakdowns. I wish it were that simple.

My thesis is that this is systemic. Voting for a Democrat is not going to create economic paradise. One of several facts that I have been unable to drag anybody to, even kicking and screaming, is that for years Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae have been Democratic feifdoms. The people who drove those outfits into the ground were Democrats, and they got rich doing it. If they had been Republicans, it would be making four-inch headlines.

P. J. O'Rourke said "When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators." This is as old as human civilization.

I'm not saying total deregulation is the answer. Free market ideas are a vector. I don't know exactly what the destination is. What has history shown us about the destinations of a socialist vector?

I don't even have a good answer. The question is too complex now. It's like asking how to fix the soup when you've been letting a five-year-old in the kitchen put things into it all morning. Worse, most people are asking the question this way: "How can the five-year-old fix the soup?"

Moving the regulatory deck chairs around is only going to work until the new loopholes are found.

We need to start recognizing that a mixed economy is a half-assed compromise, not the ideal goal it's always presented as, and start looking for some new answers. Decentralizing some of the power would be a start.