Rush to deregulate leads to disaster

Although some warned us as early as the 1960s that more, not less, government intervention and regulation would bring about lower prices and increase productivity and innovation, the great push to deregulate began and everybody got into the act.

By late in that turbulent decade, less government sounded like a good idea.

Starting with Nixon (Republican) and Ford (Republican), and then Carter (Democrat), the deregulation of the airlines, railroads and truck industries was accomplished.

That certainly has helped all these industries. Right.

Reagan followed with the natural gas and oil industries, then Bush I and Clinton followed with the energy industry. Think Enron.

Clinton continued with the telecommunications industry. Anyone have any WorldCom stock?

In the financial sector, Reagan (Republican) got the ball rolling in 1982 with the Depository Institutions Act, which allowed the savings and loan industry a free hand. This was promptly abused and led to the recession of the 1990s and $150 billion in government bailouts.

But the Republicans don't get all the glory. Clinton was able to get the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, which basically eliminated the restrictions of the Glass Seagall Act of 1933 and allowed banks to become financial casbahs and dabble in all the pieces of the financial pie; commercial and investment banking, and the brokerage and insurance industries.

One-stop shopping for all, but unfortunately these intimate connections not only allowed financial profits to flow through the mother crop and create bigger and bigger companies (and higher and higher executive salaries), but also allowed losses to flow through the other way and cause bigger and bigger problems.

These companies, that had grown "too big to fail," failed.

So we, the lay public, take the hit again.

Here we are bailing out the industries that were deregulated, were then enormously profitable for some and now through mismanagement have generated huge losses.

Through our leaders, we again fund their losses, help them again deploy their golden parachutes and again foster the wrapping of one group into another to make an bigger entity that will prove again to be "too big to fail."

All this while the value of our houses, our retirement portfolios, all of our assets take a beating.

Bernard Martin

Palatine