There is a sort of cosmic justice to this, because most of these ill advised laws were written in response to public outrage and demands that Congress "do something" about some flagrant violation of existing laws (e.g. Enron, illegal campaign donations, "hate" crimes).
In the Enron case, Enron issued obscure and cryptic, but technically truthful accounts, which supposedly showed that the company was making lots of money. This enabled the company to buy stuff with promises to pay later, and sell stuff cash in advance. A lot of people were puzzled. How was Enron making money?
A bunch of accountancy students went over Enron's accounts with a fine tooth comb, and discovered that Enron was
not making money. It was losing money hand over fist.
Word got around, and people selling stuff to Enron started demanding cash on the barrelhead, which of course Enron could not pay, and people buying stuff from Enron started demanding that they see their stuff before they paid for it, and of course Enron could not show them their stuff.
Pretty soon the paychecks bounced, people stopped turning up for work. The landlord of their offices tossed their stuff. Enron ceased to be. Capitalism 101, everything worked the way it was supposed to, except that their books were cryptic, misleading, and opaque.
So the government passed a law, Sarbannes-Oxley, supposedly banning accounts from being cryptic, misleading, and opaque.
But it was, of course, entirely impossible to comply with Sarbannes-Oxley. What people had to do instead was hire accountancy firms sufficiently important and well connected that whatever they did was deemed compliance with Sarbannes-Oxley.
The left, starting with Rousseau, have always been fundamentally hostile to civilization, all of it, lock stock and barrel. Thus with Sarbannes-Oxley the modern left did to double entry accounting, what the Occupy movement did to poop control. Sarbannes-Oxley, no less than modern university courses, is part of the left’s war on western civilization and modern technology.
If Enron's accounts were opaque, Sarbannes-Oxley accounts are irrelevant, reflecting official reality without regard to observable reality.
In the present crisis, a lot of strange accounting has come to light, strange accounting often curiously similar to that conducted by Enron – but due in part to Sarbannes-Oxley, only came to light after numerous financial institutions bit the dust, whereas before Sarbannes Oxley, it came to light before Enron bit the dust, and caused Enron to bite the dust.
The way real accounting works is that accountants ask people who actually operate the company where money and valuables are, and what was done with past money and valuables, what happened to the previous years money and valuables, and do some spot checks to make sure that the money and valuables reported to be there actually are there.
Theoretically this also happens in Sarbannes-Oxley but in practice it is is apt to be the other way around. Instead of listening, the godlike accountants tell people, and rather than the accounts reflecting reality, reality is supposed to be adjusted to reflect the accounts, much as peer review results in the scientific community telling the experimenter what he observed, instead of the experimenter telling the scientific community what he observed.
By examining Enron’s accounts carefully and cynically, people could, and did, discover that Enron was deeply in debt and losing money hand over fist, and was therefore unlikely to be able to pay for goods it had purchased, nor supply goods it had been paid for. There was no way that someone examining MF Global’s accounts could tell that MF Global had already pissed away its client’s money on European welfare bums. That is the difference that Sarbannes-Oxley made.
