Sorry, I didn't realise that America was in fact a socialist state, in which the working class had imposed overwhelming restrictions on big business.
In my naivety, I was under the impression that America, like Britain and the rest of Europe, was a country where business interests were dominant in the formulation of policy.
The statue books are jam-packed full of regulations on business whose origin is not popular imposition, but capitalist self-regulation. (The difference, as Rosdolsky explains it, between 'capital-in-general' and 'many individual capitals'.)
There are at times clashes between specific industries and the wider capitalist class that do generate special lobbies against regulation of one industry or other. But once in place those regulations generally work to rationalise the industry, and are embraced.
An internal memo explains why Enron lobbied for the Kyoto agreement: it 'would do more to promote Enron's business than will almost any other regulatory initiative.' (PR Watch Newsletter, Third Quarter 2003, Volume 10, No. 3)
Gabriel Kolko explains that in the uproar over Sinclair's exposure of the meat industry, The Jungle, 'The reality of the matter, of course, is that the big packers were warm friends of regulation, especially when it primarily affected their innumerable small competitors.' (Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism)
There is a parallel in the regulation of the meat industry in Britain after the BSE outbreak. The BSE culling, regulation and ban helped a reduction in the number of farms and farm workers, as larger businesses swallowed up the smaller. The unintended consequence of the new regulations on agri-business have been bigger agri-businesses, and fewer family farms.
In Britain, also, the larger construction companies and developers, like Persimmon, and Barratt Homes, are not opponents of the country's overwrought planning laws, but their chief defenders. To build in London, you need to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds, if not millions on lawyers and political lobbying, before you turn one sod of earth. That is a regime that favours the larger companies, raising the bar to entry by smaller rivals. It is also a regime that has left us with an historic shortage of homes.
I could give you scores of mind-numbingly technical examples of the way that the construction industry has embraced regulations for 'sustainability' in its materials, construction methods, planning laws - all of which have had the net effect of raising construction costs (all passed on to public and private customers) without remotely improving anything.
I would accept that in the past, some of the regulations were not just good for capitalism, but also good for us, in the sense that not everything that capitalism does is bad for us. Capitalism early on decided it did not want to see its workforce poisoned off (even if one or two unscrupulous capitalists do) and I am glad of that. But in this day and age, the vast majority of our laws and regulations are pointedly retrograde, wasteful and destructive.
And by the way, I hadn't noticed that the regulation of the banking industry had had any impact on the proliferation of opaque products - rather to the contrary.