Read This Now - Deregulatory Fever

Unfortunately the solution is not more cowbell. James Surowieki recently took the whole culture of deregulation to the woodshed in his New Yorker column. It's not just the millions of barrels of oil pumping into the Gulf or the still hanging around financial crisis, it's that they weren't accidents...

These failures weren’t accidents. They were the all too predictable result of the deregulationary fervor that has gripped Washington in recent years, pushing the message that most regulation is unnecessary at best and downright harmful at worst. The result is that agencies have often been led by people skeptical of their own duties. This gave us the worst of both worlds: too little supervision encouraged corporate recklessness, while the existence of these agencies encouraged public complacency.

Surowieki offers some solutions to in this short, excellent piece. Make sure to read the whole thing.