Why do Americans fear government regulation of industry?

I agree with you. With biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons we are running out of time. How free are we with bullies running the world and corrupting our laws to make bullying legal? Now very. In America the Robber Baron era resulted in railroad and coal "trusts" as they were called back then. Regulation of these monopolies resulted in anti-trust law designed to prevent bullying by a group that joins to exploit their monopoly on a product or service by charging excessive prices to the consumers who need their product. If you are starving, what would you pay for food? If you are freezing what will you pay for fuel? (Now, both of these questions have become increasingly relevant for tens of millions of Americans and over 2 billion worldwide.) Anti-trust law was largely destroyed by Reagan as were regulatory oversight of what the wealthy can do to the rest of us. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats are really coming clean since their parties are really bought-and-paid-for in our insane, contrived political "system." Note that trillions of bailout money has been contributed to the wealthy in the last few months with very, very little regulation reform. We sheep are being sheared in a whole new way! A potential breath of fresh air is Dr. John Forbes Nash whose win/win gaming theory won him the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994. The Nash model is being successfully used to negotiate business owner and employee agreements as well as trade treaties between nations where there are no losers... I'll try to transcribe the Wiki link: htpp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forbes_Nash Powerful bullies spend lots of money obscuring the great hope that comes with implementing Nash solutions. The above Wiki link does not tell what I just wrote. In the past on other issues that are distorted or obscured in Wiki I soon discovered that I could not get my revisions to stick for more than a few minutes. (Think of Orwell's 1984 where whole rooms of paid worker minions distort history to keep tyrants ruling. We live in an Orwellian world, me thinks.) So now, I mostly work on manuscript for books since the web has been "mastered" by puppet masters... (And dabble a little socially in these myLot experiments to see how long myLot will exist...) For peace on Earth, bullying needs to be outlawed. We Americans can do our part by amending our Constitution to end sanctioning abuses in power. It will go slow but has a better chance for improvement that civil war or WWIII.

Exactly. As with many things in life, the best route here is a balance. Regulated capitalism is the best of both worlds. Well said.

Where to start. Sensably regulated capitolism. We've been bouncing between feast and famine. Too much regulation and not enough regulation, the wrong regulations, out dated regulations, regulating the wrong things, neglecting the imortant fundamentals we threw out a long time ago. Laws do not nessesarily equal success. And complete unbridled running amok doesn't nessesatrily mean everyone gets rich either. The nations financial system IS one of those areaas that is an apropriate function of the federal government. the problem is, our federal government is hulking, lumbering, expensive, clumbsy, complicated, wallowing in layer upon layer of beurocrocy and has become a grossly perverted image of everything the founders of this country created. We used to have a pretty good thing going. Look what we were able to acomplish in our relatively short histoy as a nation. We were able to do this because of the sensable system and framework of government our founders set up, It was pretty much set up for nearly perpetual success as long as the stewereds of the nation stuck with the plan. Update it here and there SENSABLY as technology and world events prescribed and other than that, just leave things alone, shut up and drive. Our federal government functions best when it operates on well defined and basic functions. And in the last centuray, we have heaped so much on to it instead of leaving many smaller things to the stes, the federal government now struggles to perform even the most basic functions with any degree of effectivness, let alone run our nations financial system. Couple that with a money system that has no real value and it became collaping time bomb waiting to happen. Again. Sensable regulation. I don't understand what was so dam-n complicated about that. But I guess for sensable regulation you sensable people and sensable government. We used to have that So after this collapse, what do we do? GIVE MORE POWER AND RESPONSABILITY TO THE GOVERNMENT. our tragic flaw will read in history, that we were a people that couldn't seem to learn from our mistakes.

Well Sharra, I find this very sensible (and I generally avoid politics). I have been reading more discussions under the political umbrella recently because of the dismal state of Wall Street, the economy, real estate, shall I go on? I agree that the rich are just getting richer OFF THE POOR AND MIDDLE CLASS and this is like a big ol fat jerk who never missed a meal stealing from the little 7 year old on a street corner who hasn't eaten in three days! I do not feel that *some* regulation is bad at all. There are some things I really believe should be regulated anyway in order to allow everybody access to it without breaking the bank or going without. Anything you MUST have under the law for instance - like medical ins for kids - should be accessible and this means not at a prohibitive cost. Same for car insurance. I also think you should be a legal citizen of the country to have access to either one, to get free education, and to have a driver's license. Gas and electric should be regulated in order to not steal from the consumers because they MUST have it. Same for water. Like you, I think regulation should only step in to CONTROL and ERADICATE the worst of the greed - where a company is huge and making profits hand over fist while bleeding the average citizen dry. I also feel that we need to take care of citizens FIRST and then if we have any extra resources left over, THEN we can take care of people who aren't even supposed to be here. Taking care of others first while neglecting ourselves is causing a huge overspending problem when we already ran out of resources!

I'm not sure that 'afraid' is quite the right word. It is part of the ideology of both Republicanism and the famous American 'rugged individualism' that people should look after themselves, and what they call "big" government simply flies in the face of that ideology. And since ideologues tend to be highly inflexible, they are unable to accept that there are times when the concept of looking after oneself is simply not possible, and the government has to take a role. Coming from the opposite side of politics I believe the government should take a MAJOR role, but that said, there are things within the private business purvey, like substance use, marriage/relationship issues, lifestyle, etc., in which the government should have no role other than to provide protection for those who might be adversely affected by someone else's lifestyle. For example, if your desire for a twenty foot billboard featuring Pamela Anderson to be the feature decoration of your front wall brings heavy unwanted traffic to the street (curious onlookers) and lowers the value of your neightbours' properties (this actually happened in Melbourne a few years ago), then without some form of government intervention the only recourse would be violence of some kind - in effect, anarchy - where the strongest wins. Lash

Absolutely correct!I agree with your point of view.In particularly ,Different systems both exploit! The goernment is going to help the rich and leave the poor and the middle americans to the foot of bill .I am a Chinese,and my government has been going to help the real estate business to raise prices in China.The exploited government let people live in dire stratis.