Socialize risk, privatize gain

Eliot Spitzer writes that the Wall Street and BP calamities share a common thread: Businesses took on too much risk under the assumption that if things got really bad, someone else would bear the burden. From Slate:

At a political level, big business over the past 30 years superficially won by limiting liability and neutering the effectiveness of regulatory supervision. And the public has ended up absorbing the enormous costs of two disasters--one financial, one ecological. We will reclaim the proper balance and protection for the public only when we remedy these errors. Eliminate false caps on liability that distort incentives and behavior, or re-establish the effectiveness of the oversight agencies--from the SEC to the MMS. If we don't, the tragedies of the past several years will be premonitions of the crises to come.