I was thinking more that these kind of lax laws allowed the rich to get richer, and influence politics in ways which enabled or accelerated the fall. But it it a complicated picture of course, and the further back in the chain of causality we go the harder it it to say anything for real.

> [...] allowed the rich to get richer, and influence politics [...]

That would have been a better world than the one we live in.

I'd rather have Romney and Bloomberg etc than the populists we got.