[jjoonathan]

Or: after centuries of iteration our current regulatory environment manages to prevent all but the largest, smartest, and toughest fraudsters from doing what they do, and we should focus on improving those regulations (e.g. by working to separate money and politics) rather than ripping them down on the off chance that for some poorly explained reason the market will behave better this time.

[CryptoPunk]

We don't really have mechanisms to iterate on regulations from a societal perspective. The body polity needs to be able to evaluate the effectiveness of regulations in order to iterate on them, and that's so far outside the capabilities of the voting public as to be unimaginable.

Public choice theory would suggest that the iteration is happening on the political and public manipulation front, with rent-seeking market incumbents growing more effective at selling the public on the need for steeper barriers to market participation, and persuading political representatives to institute such barriers.

The story of the "Money Services Round Table" would be a good example of this:

http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/20110510/in-fifty-days...

Some empirical evidence:

https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/McLaughlin-Regulation-...