Recent disasters in the financial industry are giving rise to more calls for greater government regulation.  That is simple-minded thinking when it's time to step out of the box to see what's really going on.

More regulation is a poor substitute for a real solution to the causes of our financial troubles.   For one thing, regulatory agencies and powers eventually only favor the special interests (segments of the industry that certainly don't include YOU) because regulation is power and power corrupts.

But more importantly, regulations ignore the fundamental causes of our problems, so the problems will still exist and regulations will only succeed in temporarily hiding them and prolonging their eventual impact.  There's nothing terribly wrong with modern investment vehicles like mortgage-backed securities.  The true problem is whatever caused the drop in value of their assets.  I'd like to hear exactly what new regulations would have prevented that.

Today's troubles all stem back to years of less-than-responsible borrowing,  investing, and buying (homes, for example) due to easy phony money and artificially low interest rates created by the the Federal Reserve in order to fund trillions of dollars of government deficit.

Instead of more regulation, what we need is for our money to be controlled by the people (Congress, rather than the banks) and backed by hard assets; a free market in all goods and services (rather than a market distorted by interference); and a balanced budget (rather than running on trillions of dollars of borrowed money that is printed out of thin air). 

Calling for more regulation fails to understand the cause of our illness and merely tries to treat the symptoms.