Liberals have a clear plan for increasing government's control over our lives.
Step 1: Choose an industry
Step 2: Claim the industry is special.
Step 3: Regulate the industry
Step 4: Repeat
Claiming the industry is special was first used in the health care debate, and now is used by Paul Krugman to persuade us that banking needs to be regulated. Are there any industries that can't be described as special?
Note: I do not mean to argue here that regulation is always and everywhere unnecessary, but only want to put people on the lookout.
Also: in Krugman's op-ed, he implies that there were almost no regulations on banks in the Gilded Age, which isn't exactly true. As I recall, banks were regulated by states instead of Congress. Most states did not allow banks to open branches to serve multiple locations. The inability of banks to diversify their accounts geographically did a lot to destabilize the system.
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