It is obvious that a great era is ending. The capitalistic market has become a great spectre arriving just just a little early for Halloween. As it dies worldwide though, it is still sucking vast amounts of money from the people of many nations into hidden pools of unmeasurable wealth. The term "deregulation" has become a synonym for "gotcha", and now the survivors are having to figure out how to "bell the great cat".
The very concept of a free enterprise system requires a free market. Without a free market, there can be no free enterprise. No market can possibly be free if it is dominated by a single organization or a small number of very large organizations. No free market can exist in any economic system unless there is adequate governmental regulation and enforcement to protect it and keep more powerful companies from seizing that market and reshaping it for their own purposes. A free market is not a market that is free FROM governmental regulation but a market which is free BECAUSE it is strongly regulated by the government. It makes no essential difference whether a market is dominated by a communistic, dictatorship, or theological government or by a cartel of capitalistic corporations, in any of those cases the free and competitive market ceases to function and begins to serve its master.
It is not enough to simply pass strong regulatory laws and enforce them rigidly. There must be significant enforcement as well. If a poor man robs a 7-11 store and gets $13, the police will pursue him, and if found and convicted he may serve years in jail. However, if a rich man robs thousands of people of millions of dollars, no police will pursue him, he will not be tried for anything, and the worst that will possibly happen to him is that he will have to spend the rest of his life in luxury.
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