Since the free banking period of the US did not see any such crashes, your assertion is speculative at best. We also don't find such crashes and unsustainable booms in the periods before the dollar was removed from an objective measure (such as gold).

"One need only look back to the Great Depression and the stock market crash of 1929, when short selling and buying stocks on margin caused major havoc in the financial system, to see that some regulation is a Good Thing(tm)."

Your assertion here ignores a much larger crash that had occurred in years prior, but self-corrected. The '29 crash was so spectacular because of a number of factors.

Leading up to '29, there was a series of smaller boom/bust cycles-1819–1820, 1839–1843, 1857–1860, 1873–1878, 1893–1897, and 1920–1921. In each case, government had generated a boom through easy money and credit, which was soon followed by the inevitable bust.

The spectacular crash of 1929 followed five years of reckless credit expansion by the Federal Reserve System under the Coolidge administration. In 1924, after a sharp decline in business, the Reserve banks suddenly created some $500 million in new credit, which led to a bank credit expansion of over $4 billion in less than one year. While the immediate effects of this new powerful expansion of the nation's money and credit were seemingly beneficial, initiating a new economic boom and effacing the 1924 decline, the ultimate outcome was most disastrous. It was the beginning of a monetary policy that led to the stock-market crash in 1929 and the following depression.

I have a number of other statistics I can cite if you are interested.