Comments like that of "z" above, declaring the financial industry space of last year to be "free and underregulated," demonstrates a profound paradigm misalignment. In fact, not only was the 2008 financial environment subject to countless regulations, but those supposedly doing the regulating were part of the problem, with political and financial influence flowing heavily between industry and government. Congressional control over the past decades switched parties, but the essential mutual backscratching never really changed. Nobody who can place entities like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the same reality space as "free market" has any understanding of the concept.

The question of regulation is constantly shoved into an "either-or" category where it is assumed that the only two choices are absolute laizzes-faire or the massive regulatory set we have now, and the even more massive regulatory set coming down the pike.

I am stipulating that there is a very wide space between the law of the jungle; and tens of thousands of pages of rules that mandate every economic activity down to the microscopic level, mostly generated by people utterly clueless about the businesses they want to control.

I want to start to move back into that space. Any problems with that?

The automobile industry requires months to years of time to retool and rework a massive factory and vendor system to create new models and technologies. It has not helped the industry to have idiots changing the rules constantly on random whims according to whatever strange internal realities they operate on.

There are people who believe, down in the bone, that the only reason we don't have big, cheap cars that get 50 mpg and don't pollute is because of corporate greed and stupidity, and that the only thing needed is to simply pass a law commanding it all into reality. Some of these people probably still think there's a water-burning carburator hidden in Ford's basement.