I hope y'all are reading Virginia Postrel's Dynamist Blog every day. Hers is a great example of a "long-tail" blog. Her posts are infrequent but very insightful. They probably lend themselves better to an RSS blog reading system than to daily visits.
She has been on a tear lately. If you haven't clicked in a bit I would go read her top seven posts. Two of them are on Sarbanes-Oxley. I think she has captured the Conservative Zeitgeist once again. Buyer's remorse of this high-intentioned but ill-thought bill is really starting to set in:
Taxes and spending get most of the attention, but regulations can be just as expensive and far more wasteful. Take the Sarbanes-Oxley bill, passed in the post-Enron panic as a demonstration that Congress and the administration cared and were doing something. Compliance costs a fortune, siphoning funds from productive investments (including hiring); that the law took effect in the middle of a recession didn't help the economic recovery. More significant is the long-term effect. The law threatens to block smaller firms from going public, cutting them off from a major source of capital. That effect will filter backward, making venture capital funding more difficult by eliminating one way VCs get their money out.
This is a bad bill, passed in haste, to prove Congress could "do something about Enron." Well, yes, we could shut down all Corporations, that's one way to cut corporate corruption...