For one of these babies:

Is that it never works when you need it.

When you look at the financial mess we are working through, it is clear to most people that we needed more regulation.

Our banks and financial institutions were totally over-leveraged, and at some point a federal regulator should have stepped in and stopped them before they reached the breaking point.

The accepted story is that companies like AIG and Countrywide fell into a regulatory gap in our system, that no one was overseeing them, and thus they were free to run wild.

But this is not the case.

As it turns out, there was no gap. AIG, Countrywide, IndyMac, and Washington Mutual, some of the largest failures of this crisis, were all under the purview of one regulator, the Office of Thrift Supervision.

The OTS had the job of watching these companies and reining them in before they could do any catastrophic damage. The OTS failed miserably at this job.

The problem with regulation is that once we believe the government is watching the problem, we stop paying attention. We act less responsibly.