[tszyn]

I've noticed that most examples of regulatory capture provided in the Wikipedia article involve regulatory agencies failing to enforce rules on selected companies (e.g. BP was allowed to drill in the Gulf of Mexico without doing the environmental legwork, Goldman Sachs was allowed to manipulate the commodities markets, etc.), which resulted in Very Bad Things happening. These cases don't show that "big government" regulation is bad. They show that failure to regulate is bad. Off the top of my head, I can't think of too many examples of companies using the government to their own ends. OTOH, I can think of many examples of government restricting the freedom of corporations in the name of some social good. For this reason, I think that if we scaled back the government, corporations would have more power, not less. (Not to mention other negative effects of government abdicating its responsibilities in particular areas.)