The bevy of government rules created since the financial crisis five years ago have hurt more than they have helped, according to a Wall Street Journal editorial.

"Five years after the panic we have a financial system that is more heavily regulated, and thus is less able to lend and innovate, yet is paradoxically no safer," Journal editors write. "The government won again."

The editors certainly don't think much of the Dodd-Frank Act on financial reform, which was passed in 2010.

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"Dodd Frank's great reform conceit is that the same regulators who missed the last crisis ... will somehow prevent the next crisis," the editorial says. "It won't happen."

The government has turned the country's biggest banks into "regulated utilities," The Journal editors argue.

"A sensible reform would have been to require more capital as a bumper against losses, and to use a basic definition of capital that can't be gamed. Instead, the regulators are requiring more capital while adding vast new layers of regulation."

The government should set rules that constrain risk taking at banks with insured deposits, the editorial states. Then it should "let other companies innovate and take risks knowing they get no taxpayer protection."

Peter Morici, professor of international business at University of Maryland, isn't too impressed with Dodd-Frank either.

"Dodd-Frank bank reforms have not stopped reckless and unethical behavior on Wall Street," he writes on his blog.

"Yet new regulations have imposed burdensome costs on smaller banks, forcing many to sell out to the Wall Street casinos."

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