Re: back to the land policies

"It was Roosevelt's efforts in the 30s that brought power and water to places where private enterprise didn't have enough of a profit motive to bring it."

Which largely killed the nascent small generation industry, including promising development of small-scale wind power.

Yeah, without government investment, rurul electrification might've happened to some extent many years down the road. And without the work of NASA from the 50s onwards, private industry might've eventually come up with some of the innovations we got from the space program decades later, although it's questionable whether there ever would've been enough of a short-term profit opportunity for private industry to be able or interested.

I don't have the time right now to read through the article you linked, but skimming through it it does look like some increases in regulation under Bush were in response to 9/11, which doesn't surprise me. But it's not just regulation of lack thereof that's the issue; it's also massive underfunding and understaffing of important agencies like the FDA and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and stacking these agencies with pro-corporate types rather than people who are actually interested in regulating industry.

I think it's pretty clear though that the two oil men we elected into office weren't too keen on regulating the oil industry (in particular, if BP's well had been required to have an acoustic switch, as other countries require on underwater wells, the current disaster might've been prevented). And we're suffering the effects of this lack of government regulation now. The fact that the free market is hammering BP economically for their lack of responsibility is of little comfort to those who are being impacted by the spill and watching irreparable damage being done to their environment. The damage has been done. We don't need a free market correction; we need a responsible government that was doing it's job to begin with and competently regulating this industry.