The financially irresponsible bank behavior that contributed to these panics was indirectly promoted by the policies of President Andrew Jackson, not by the free market.
While a law that keeps municipalities from enacting ridiculous Bloomberg-like bans might sound like a good idea, what we really have here are corporations doing what they can to centralize power into a body that they can more easily influence.
Instead of making cuts that could truly streamline or improve (read: reduce) government, Obama is ordering his agencies to make the cuts in the most visible areas, the places that will affect you most drastically, in order to scare you into submission.
