you're trivializing a complex issue. government oversight caused the disaster? spare me the FUD. Oversight is very very useful and respected where it helps business and derided where it just helps the average taxpayer.

For example, you won't see many people complaining about oversight of the financial industry--because money talks--and stability and correct information are extremely important to major investors and business. The overall industry does not want too weak a set of regulations--they want a quality SEC to mitigate risk. And that's what they get.

Contrast that with the design of energy regulations, which are not good for profit margins, and thus business managed to tweak them from the start to lessen consumer protections, mitigate their loss of profit, and leave regulators with very little bite. This happened in california, and happens at the national level (see Cheney and the energy bill, for example)

In the end, California has been left trying to sue to get some money back from a program that was, unfortunately, too catered to business interests.

without oversight (either nonprofit or govt) of key commodity/minimal choice industries (at the least) business will game the customer because it has an effective local monopoly, and it will do so regardless of whether the customer is the government or a private citizen. In the case of Enron, the energy industry was heavily involved in designing the CA regulation in the first place. the _method_ of oversight and/or regulation is important, but tweak the method, dont simply disregard the importance of oversight.