But your original response was a target-rich environment, beyond merely the flawed straw-man argument. For example, there's your assertion without evidence that most of the regulations on the books were imposed in reaction to past corporate "malfiance" (sic), which blissfully ignores all of the other agendas that are factored into government regulations. But then this discussion has strayed pretty far from the topic of the original article, and so I'll let it rest.
The problem with the position that you have taken is that gradualism has lead to the creation of a structural and cannot be attacked piecemeal. It is difficult to argue agains each and every regulation. The problem is the total burden placed upon economic activities of tax, law and regulation. Another way of asking the question is what fraction of the employed population is engaged in producing goods and services that would trade freely on the open market? Every economy has an "overhead" of folks engaged in "non-productive" transactions. That is part of life. The question is, when the cost of all of non-discretionary non-value-added transactions makes goods and services strongly uncompetitive how do you unwind the problem. The answer is that it is not easy. It used to be, in a more or less closed economy where raw-materials and finished goods were traded that you could win by debasing your currency. In the global economy you decrease the cost of your labor, but increase the costs of everything else involved in production. In fact, if your own country is not adding most of the value to the final product, you loose. There are a number of undue structural burdens that the individual entrepreneur cannot control:
1. Burden of the legal system - which is not to claim we do not need this. This includes cost of lawyers, courts, and insurance liabiltiy and malpractice premiums.
2. Cost of regulatory complience- this includes the cost of folks to fill in paper work, as well as the burden on your core of expert who must provide everyone else the information they need to take care of compliance issues.
3. Cost of capital and financial services - this is more subtle than just the cyrrent interest rate. It means the cost of all the things that you have to do to keep your stock price up, avoide hostile takeovers, deal with in-house financial irregularites, stock price manipulation, pay extortionate compensation to top management and key players, etc. Warren Buffett estimates that 1/3 of all corporate profits are consumed by the financial services industry. I would bet in recent years it is a lot higher than that.
Tax burden. If it just started and ended at the federal and state income tax it would be sort of ok. But you and everyone else knows that the list just goes on and on. Recently - well, since he took office - Greenspan has been inflating the money supply. Most recently real-estate prices have skyrocketed. The immediate impact of that is that cities and counties are busy reassessing property values to increase property taxes. Some predict that this bubble like the stock-markte bubble will burst - because no new net demand or economic activity has been added. It will take years for personal and corporate incomes and the property taxes to adjust back to some sort of similarity to the status quo.