This. The problem isn't that the government doesn't have enough rules to control business. The problem is the government is so involved in every aspect of life it's become far more efficient to co-opt the state than to compete with other companies in your sector.

For some reason people on the left think if only the government was more involved, this time it would work to rein in powerful people instead of making them more powerful like the last 97 times.

I once maintained that Senate Republicans on the Banking committee supported a complex regulatory regime because their influence and status derived from the value they provided helping banks navigate that regulatory apparatus. My left-wing friends regarded this as the most cynical thing they'd ever heard, but they didn't have much evidence or analysis against it.

Politicians want a powerful state because their power derives from their influence over that state. They want their power to grow because no one is ever satisfied with what they have.

If the US has a Serratta, it would be in the impossibility of doing business without managing political relations, and thus the exclusion of people with serious interests from any serious effort to reform the state. I'm not sure we're there yet, but if we aren't we're dangerously close.

Why do you consider "the rich" and "the government" as two separate entities? Now that we have made some advances in network theory, perhaps it would be better to think of the social relations of political economy as an intricate network, rather than simply two lumps -- the economy as separate from the state. At the height of laissez-faire, in Rockefeller and JP Morgan's days, the government was intervening to squash strikes, granting land to railroads, even invading other countries for the benefit of specific American companies.

There's no us and them. It's all just us.

There is no evidence that less regulation wouldn't careen us towards more massive wealth inequality even faster, as it did in the 1920s.

Pretty much every business sector demonstrates massive economics of scale, and once you get $10billion+ companies, you're kind of damned if you do and damned if you don't. If the government doesn't step in, those huge companies band together to screw regular people (see, e.g., tech companies colluding to keep engineer salaries down through). If the government does step in, those huge companies co-opt it through lobbying.

I think the solution may be a smaller government that is more aggressive about enforcement. Make it extremely difficult to grow companies larger than say $1 billion. Be much more aggressive about breaking up burgeoning monopolies instead of waiting until they get too powerful.

I think most liberals would agree with you. I want the absolute minimum amount of regulation that effectively manages the free market as well as minimal basic social safety nets.