speaking of capture

Regulate what?

"On the House Agriculture Committee, which holds sway over farm policies and subsidies, members had farming and agribusiness investments worth five times on average the amount held by other colleagues in the House. Many of the committee members' holdings were in family farms. Nothing prevents those members from also receiving farm subsidies, and in the past, some have.

Likewise, House Energy and Commerce Committee members, who routinely hold hearings about telecommunications and computer issues, had heavier than average investments in companies such as Oracle, Nokia, AT&T and Verizon."

It's to be expected that people have investments and portfolios. What's a little fishy is when they essentially game those portfolios by changing the rules to favor themselves. At our expense. The tricky part is more that one would expect that a person with "real world" experience in, say, technology management or the defence industry would be rather useful to have on a committee to oversee such an industry. At the same time, they're also more likely to be heavily invested in it if they have investments simply because it's something they likely understand or have received stock in from their private sector experiences. Those are probably not "problems" in the sense that we should draw outrage from them. But if they're getting on a committee precisely to favor the policies that will produce positive gains on their private company holdings, that's something we should be on the lookout for.

And it would, as with the financial and health care "reforms", explain why the status quo is not going anywhere. Such interests aren't just entrenched through competitive lobbying. They are the lawmakers and, indeed as MMS has shown, sometimes the law enforcers too.