With all due respect, I think it's delusional to think you can give so much power to the government, with regards to such a powerful country, and not expect that it will be abused. You can change the rules of the game as much as you want, as long as that pot of gold is there (power); cronyism will rule. I accept that people with leftist leanings would love him; but his socialist views and his detachment with reality make him seem a nutter for those who believe in a fiscally responsible government. He can preach free this or that as much as he wants but it just makes him seem more of a charlatan to me; there is no such thing as free.
I don't think I have advocated for anything that would increase the power of the government. What I am advocating is restoring parity between the power of the government and the power of the corporation. Right wing folks harp on federal regulation as being some massive yoke holding back the private sector because it evokes simplicity of solution. I will usually ask for specific examples of federal regulations that are overbearing to no avail, perhaps you could provide them.
In general, as I said in the post you quoted, we have individuals with immense conflicts of interest in positions of power to regulate the very industry that they have just arrived from, or are soon to embark to. This is a major issue and a reason that regulations are rarely enforced to the extent that they were meant to be. I (and I think Bernie) have never said anything is free. He advocates taxing Wall St speculation and the financial products of the shadow banking system in order to pay for public higher education. When an industry that was already doing well invents practices that have been proven toxic to society as a whole, especially after taxpayers had to foot the enormous bill for such practices, i think it is more than prudent for the government to find a way to curtail said practices. The benefits of such a system are to discourage the practices that were a big player in pitching the world into a recession while simultaneously offsetting the sharply rising costs of higher education which, to this point, have caused their own societal ills with young people indebting themselves beyond their means (and in turn, making the financial industry boatloads of money).
That, moderate increase of taxes on the mega-rich, closing of tax loopholes for super profitable international conglomerates, and reallocation of our out of control defense spending (including the NSA) would be sufficient to make the kind of changes Bernie has proposed I think (I have yet to see an in depth explanation to the contrary). In addition, there are tons of systemic shifts that can be made that will both save money in the short term, and have broad, positive knock on effects in the long term. One is dramatic scale back of the drug war, and in turn a diminished taxpayer cost for mass incarceration. Pair this with the new tax resources that legalized marijuana would provide and you are saving tax dollars on enforcement, saving on exorbitant incarceration costs, returning hundreds of thousands of people to participate in the economy, and the added intangible but very real benefit of reuniting families (we all know how much better intact families fare economically).
I wouldn't qualify any of the above as some drastic increase in the power and overreach of government power, and in some cases is a dramatic decrease of it. Changing the rules on campaign finance and increasing voter turnout would go a long way to prising the govt back from the few, and increases in tech have only made the govt more transparent so that boundary oversteps are more easily spotted.
Investment in clean energy and our crumbling infrastructure is a high initial outlay, but one that would have far-reaching and long lasting economic benefits for the nation. The new deal worked, climate change is real and will be very expensive (how much did Katrina cost all told, and how much does crop loss cost, just to name two symptoms/similar effects), and our infrastructure was a big player in the economic gains of mid last century. There will always be cronyism and there will always be mistakes made by the government, but taking sensible steps that don't cost much to curtail these is vastly preferable in my mind than continued maintenance of the status quo that is by all accounts getting worse.
