Where this was said
Reagan, Deregulation, and the Conditions for Fraud
At 6:53 · chapter starts 6:35
This chapter zeroes in on the ideological scaffolding that made Enron possible: Ronald Reagan's deregulation agenda of the 1980s. Josh quotes Reagan's famous line — 'Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem' — and notes that while some deregulation is not inherently bad, doing it 'fully and incorrectly' always leads to disaster. Chuck adds a sharper critique: the free-market framework consistently fails to account for the inevitability of greedy humans exploiting systems for personal gain, often to the detriment of ordinary people. A key regulatory inflection point is the 1984 FERC decision that allowed natural gas to be bought and sold across state lines, opening the door for Enron to pivot from pipelines to commodity trading.
Ronald Reagan's belief in 'the magic of the marketplace' ushered in sweeping deregulation that Enron weaponized. Deregulation isn't inherently wrong — but it always seems to be done incorrectly, leaving systems wide open to exploitation by the greediest humans in the room.
