Businesses are about profit and self-interest. Governments are about power and self-interest.

This is reality. If you want to balance things, you need something to balance it. In a free market system, checks and balances are built into the system by competition between self-interested entities. There may be extreme cases where something like anti-trust action needs to be brought in, but that's rare, even today.

How do you balance government power? The largest companies in the nation are helpless if the government decides they have to be taken down or brought into line, and God help the little ones. We fancy that We The People are running things when we trot down to the voting booth, but I can count the national government employees I vote directly for on one hand. The rest are mostly accountable to themselves, and we cross our fingers that the person we voted for--usually from two less-than-ideal choices--picks the right people who pick the right people who pick the right people. In an age where core principles are an outmoded notion, we are left hoping that the whims of our leaders run in the right direction at the right time.

"Accountability of government to the people" is mostly a lie we tell ourselves to make us feel better. Most of the daylight shed on the crap that happens in government comes from the fact that we have two major parties fiercely opposing each other. Competition.

The founders understood that government, unless restrained, decays into tyranny. The original idea of this country was a national government that was highly limited, the equivalent of a traffic cop who makes sure things flow smoothly, and that the states could work together in important areas. Bit by bit, over the years, the idea faded.

What we have now is government that essentially has no limits, and a population that seems willing to live with that.

If someone in Washington right now decided GM shall produce only white cars, or that the maximum interest rate on credit cards shall be 1 percent, a lot of people might think that was nuts, but very few would question the inherent right of the State to actually force such commands on a private business. We have a population that can't even think outside the government box any more. There are reasons for that, but that's for another time.

My idea of a privatized inspection system would work in a competitive environment. There's really no need for an additional government level (why would that be any more effective than one more private entity watching the others?). But it's all theoretical, of course. Most Americans could not conceive of something like that without the comfort of a government bureaucracy behind it who REALLY has all the power. As I understand it, there is a regulatory agency charged with "approving" companies like UL.