Good discussion you two, keep posting links, I'm learning a lot.

Here's one of the episodes of Free to Choose by Milton Friedman. Starting at 9:00 Friedman talks about how the Interstate Commerce Commission was set up to regulate the railroads but ended up making train travel worse. He says that consumer advocacy groups are the ones who are usually behind the creation of a new agency, but once that's done, they move on to the next cause and don't pay too much attention to how the agency actually develops. The only people with the motivation to give their undivided attention to the ICC were the railroad companies themselves. The ICC ended up being packed with company men, and of course they produced regulations that just made it hard for new competitors to enter the market.

I think a similar thing happened with the SEC. The big firms on Wall Street are the people with the greatest interest in what the SEC does so it was inevitable that SEC regulations would sometimes have more to do with what's best for Freddie Mac or whoever than what's best for the public.[/url]