Or, we could try casting the FedGov back into the Constitutional prison designed for it by our Founders. There's a whole bunch of stuff about that on the Free Republic Home Page. You might want to drop by there and actually read it sometime.
Lurker, who thinks Parsy is really only into his political adolescence no matter how grown up he thinks he is.
This is a good recap from answers.com. The whole article is instructive. The point is, that even deregulation brings its dangers. Best answer is sensible regulation.
The 1980s and 1990s saw further Deregulation. Consumers as well as business have benefited from this trend, but there have been notable failures. Deregulation of the savings and loan industry led to a series of bank failures in the late 1980s that cost the federal government more than $1 trillion. In 2001, deregulation of California’s power industry created electricity shortages, raised wholesale and retail prices, and forced two of that states largest utility companies to declare bankruptcy. The energy trading company, Enron, along with other energy brokers, which were all created because of deregulation, has been accused of conspiring to manipulate California’s power supply and creating the state’s energy crisis.
In December 2001 Enron became the center of another scandal when its bankruptcy, the largest to date in the nation’s history, revealed that the company had used deceptive accounting practices to inflate its earning reports and stock price. This was the first in a series of corporate bankruptcies to involve fraudulent bookkeeping that shook an already weak stock market in 2002. To restore investor confidence, the federal government exercised its regulatory authority to promote greater scrutiny of the securities, accounting, and power utility industries.
The accounting scandals of the early twenty-first century recall the business scandals of the late 1800s and early 1900s when antagonism between business and government regulators became ingrained. Despite this antipathy, the two sides have, in fact, benefited from each other. Government regulations ensuring the enforceability of contracts and property rights are such basics that business in the United States could not function properly without them. Likewise, without the economic growth created by private business, the U.S. government could not sustain itself. Although the current system of federal and state regulations may sometimes be self-contradictory, and, in addition, confusing to the business community, it is a relatively loose one, leaving the United States as one of the nations whose business welfare depends most on the decisions of private entrepreneurs.
Bibliography
Laffont, Jean-Jacques, and Jean Tirole. Competition in Telecommunications. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000.
Lai, Loi Lei, ed. Power System Restructuring and Deregulation. New York: Wiley, 2001.
Macey, Jonathan R., Geoffrey P. Miller, and Richard Scott Carnell. Banking Law and Regulation. 3d ed. Gaithersburg, Md.: Aspen Publishers, 2000.
Peritz, Rudolph J. R. Competition Policy in America, 1888–1992: History, Rhetoric, Law. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Singer, Jonathan W., and Keneth E. Montague, eds. Broken Trusts: The Texas Attorney General Versus the Oil Industry, 1889–1909. Vol. 12, Oil and Business History Series. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002.
Viscusi, W. Kip, John M. Vernon, and Joseph E. Harrington Jr. Economics of Regulation and Antitrust, 3d ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000.
parsy, who agrees our gov’t is way too big