[venomsnake]

Regulations that make possible entrance to a market - standards, forced ineroperability, common carrier, dumb pipes etc - are generally good and provide more efficient market.

Regulations that prevent entrance to a market - by artificially rising the capital requirements to the impossible, are probably not helping the free market.

[tomp]

Exactly - the government should prevent markets from becoming less free - discouraging monopoly, persecuting fraud, encouraging transparency, taxing (appropriately) externalities, and owning natural monopolies (like infrastructure - dumb pipes owned by the government or a very regulated entity, and used by market competitors). I also think there should be less regulation in certain very regulated markets (banking, food) to encourage experimentation, but those should come with restrictions (e.g. no advertising, limited sales volume, etc.) - I think the world of hedge funds is a good example - they have less restricitons and hence can offer lower costs and better (or less correlated) performance, but they are effectively closed off to the general public (only "knowledgeable" investors can invest).