Who do you think WRITES legislation, TB? Teams of industry lobbyists come in and "advise" congressional staffs in putting together bills and actually provide them with text. You know that, you've mentioned it yourself. Every line of verbiage has been carefully designed to protect someone's profit. These people don't care about rising costs, or whatever it takes to buy influence; because they just pass it all on to the consumer.

"Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, Lenin, Mao", what kind of graphic novel bogeyman crap is that? Spare us the puerile 50s geopolitical view of the world, not even the Russians and Chinese believe that shit any more. The whole Washington circus is a dance between politicians, bureaucrats and other assorted beltway bandits to provide an uninterrupted flow of profit to the big companies. Politics is not a global struggle between noble Randian entrepreneurs and drooling Eurasian despots, as you seem to have deluded yourself in your adolescent libertarian fantasies. It's a bunch of Vegas sleazeballs in suits "coordinating and facilitating" to make sure the machine keeps rolling along in a profitable manner. They effortlessly job-hop from private to public sector and back, and you can't even tell them apart at the elegant cocktail parties where they collect to do their work.

You've even come close to admitting it yourself when you've posted how in your Sunday School libertarian paradise businesses would not be allowed to manipulate governmental organizations to short circuit their more efficient competitors. (Right, can you see any politician, bureaucrat or businessman actually supporting legislation that would eliminate their source of power and profit?)

You see, it's not robber barons like Vanderbilt and Rockefeller we have to deal with any more. What we face now are organizations of hired technicians who work ceaselessly to ensure their companies' existence, growth and prosperity. These are the "collectives" you are so paranoid about. The executives and managers are on salary, they're just employees, and their bosses are other companies, institutions, funds , banks and other decentralized organizations. What we have here is perfect Communism, except it's not designed for the proletariat, or even for the bourgeosie, but for the companies themselves. And these hired guns prosper only as long as their companies prosper so they have no choice but to do what their instructions bid them do. It's not a battle between Capitalism and Communism any more. The two have merged.

There is no entrepreneurial free enterprise any more, not as you envision it: dad running the Carpet Warehouse downtown, doing his best to serve his customers, outperform his competitors, and evade City Hall. There never was, except maybe down at the amateur level.
This isn't Classical free enterprise. It's relativistic finance capitalism, the Corporate Welfare State. While you were dreaming, it has evolved.