Robber Barons?

When does mission creep become censorship?

"The sort of abuse of power we are seeing out of ASIC is endemic to the regulatory state.
The logic is as follows.

The relationship between a regulator and a regulated organisation (let's say a company operating in a marketplace) is like a continuous game of cat and mouse. A regulator makes a rule. A company changes its behaviour to comply with the rule. But, assuming the rule imposes some sort of cost on the company, the company will look for loop-holes to minimise the cost.

The frustrated regulator will write another rule to close off the loop-hole. The cycle continues.
The economist Edward Kane calls this relationship the regulatory dialectic. ASIC is a perfect case study.
Caught up in its never-ending battle with the companies it regulates, it has been lobbying for powers which no free society ought to grant even to its national security services. It has been trying its hand at censorship. And it's launched legal crusades to raise its profile and its political and financial support.
Lawyers and economists like to talk about the content of regulation. What does a regulation permit? What does it prohibit? Nobody wants to legalise fraud or theft.

But ASIC's extraordinary abuses of power reveal how regulation plays out in the real world - not on the clean page of legislation, or the tight confines of an economists' model, but when self-interested bureaucrats are asked to enforce uncertain laws against an unwilling private sector."

Deregulate everything and bring back the robber barons.

Chris Berg shows his true colours once again. There is a place for these views in a robust democracy.