Regulators rush in...

Writing in today's FT about the need for a new and improved statutory regulatory framework for London's post-Big Bang financial markets in the 1980s, Nigel Lawson records:

The government sought the advice of Professor Jim Gower, who wisely observed that the level of supervision should not “seek to achieve the impossible task of protecting fools from their own folly”, but should rather “be no greater than is necessary to protect reasonable people from being made fools of” – a rubric that is today too often overlooked.

Which is perhaps the best definition of an appropriate level of government regulation I've read.