The Treasury Secretary’s Lawyer (who else?), Antonio Weiss, has a piece on The Wall Street Journal defending the Regulatory State’s control over our financial markets.

He opened it with a strawman.

Some say regulation has killed it, and the answer is to roll back financial reform.

A carefully unnamed “some” in his strawman. He’ll have to play with his dolly without this writer. There is, too, his false assumption in that claim: rolling back financial reform assumes there’s been reform to roll back. There certainly has been a potful of added regulation to our financial markets, all spurred by the Democrats’ Dodd-Frank bill. The bill that created a wholly unaccountable—not even through Congress’ control of purse strings—panel, the CFPB, that decides how financial institutions must behave, even to the point of deciding what business counts as a financial institution that must accept the panel’s decrees.

There’s no reform there. Only the deformation of our free market economy.

And there’s this bit:

The marketplace is rapidly evolving. We must address future challenges without rekindling crises of the past.

Because, gotta have a regulation. After all,

However, market participants report difficulty in executing large orders across various asset classes. And there are concerns over whether the growing ownership of corporate bonds by mutual funds could overwhelm market capacity if there were a sudden wave of redemptions. Moreover, the “flash rally” last Oct 15 in US Treasurys, our deepest and most liquid market, saw yields drop dramatically and snap back within minutes, with no clear catalyst.

Can’t let a free market, a market uncontrolled by Know Betters, find its own solutions to the market niche of asset-class-spanning orders, a niche that couldn’t exist before technology (with the Know Betters have demonstrated they have no capability of managing—see the IRS’ computer “upgrade,” or the security of American’s personal records in the not-so-safekeeping of the OPM) made such a thing possible, much less useful. Can’t let those evil mutual funds—Big Wall Street Business, don’t you know—manage their own finances. No, our Know Betters, who have shown they can’t manage a government budget have to do that. Can’t have an error in software go unpunished by Know Better Regulation rather than leaving it to actual experts and businessmen whose interests lie in prompt correction of such glitches.

The Left, the party of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Woodrow Wilson, and Herb Croly, just can’t conceive of Americans getting by without a Federal Regulation to tell us what to do. No matter how foolish the Left’s Regulation.