> That obviously not necessarily true. One can imagine a change in law that limits tax sheltering of this type for any individual to say, 10mm. A tiny fraction of the population would be affected.

Or limit the types of assets that can be held in an IRA to those that are publicly traded and can be bought on the open market. It seems like an important part of this scheme was Thiel basically got to set the price of some shares he sold himself, because they weren't publicly traded at the time.

Then you are limiting what people can do with their money 2 inflating stock prices of giant companies. What if I want to invest in a friend's business or buy a rental property. Are you saying it should be illegal for me to do that with my IRA?

> Then you are limiting what people can do with their money 2 inflating stock prices of giant companies.

So? It's what 99.999% of them do anyway.

> What if I want to invest in a friend's business or buy a rental property. Are you saying it should be illegal for me to do that with my IRA?

Yes.

No. IRA is funded with your money, so you should be able to do with it what you please. Next you'll be telling people they can only buy ETFs because stocks are too risky.

You can do what you please with your money and one of your choices is to put it in an ira or not. If you've decided to put it in a specially tax advantaged shelter defined by the government then you follow the rules they define for that status, if you don't want to then you don't put it in an ira

> No. IRA is funded with your money, so you should be able to do with it what you please.

No. You can't even do what you please with money that's not in an IRA. And I mean, you already have to accept other restrictions to enjoy the tax advantages of an IRA, so what's so bad about adding another small one to solve this problem?

If you can legally invest in an asset in a taxable account, you should be able to invest in the same when its an IRA. Anyone can take advantage of this. Why do you want to restrict the way people invest their retirement funds?

All money is yours legally. The gov can tax it.

Some things are are illegal to do with money and assets, but that doesn't mean that everything belongs to the government

The gains over doing the same at a taxable accounts are not your money, but public funds (the taxes not paid on those).

With taxable accounts, it is legally your assets, gains or not. You pay taxes when you sell. Just like with a traditional, non-Roth IRA: you pay taxes when you withdraw. The IRS makes the rules.

The IRS doesn't make the rules, but enforces them.

Unlike a somewhat popular opinion on this website, the law isn't an algorithm, but a codification of societal norms, like that we all share the expanses of living in civilized society.

Yes, the TRANSFER of assets happens at time of sell or withdrawal, but the share taxes was painted such when we (the people, through legislation. Not the IRS!) decided that such share should be dedicated to society.

This isn't about letter of the law, and never was: it's being an asshole.

That doesn't even make sense. The "share" is not known until the assets are sold or withdrawn, and also subject to change based on whatever tax law happens to be at the time. If I hold a stock long term, instead of day trading and accruing short term gains and associated taxes, am I being an asshole?

Better yet, they can only invest in blue-chip companies

It always amazes me how quick people are to needlessly take away freedoms and fuck others over as a knee-jerk reaction.

Putting restrictions on others should have careful thought and clear rationale.

> It always amazes me how quick people are to needlessly take away freedoms and fuck others over as a knee-jerk reaction.

What freedoms? We're talking about tax advantaged investment accounts intended for a very specific public purpose, which are already restricted in many ways because of that.

If you don't like restrictions, we could also solve this problem by abolishing IRAs then. Does that sound better to you?

You are proposing adding new restrictions on what people can do with their money. That is taking away their freedom. It is worse because you propose it as a solution to problem that doesn't even exist.

Your being very optimistic here and changes will make the existing v poor US pensions system worse.

edge cases make bad law eg using the small number of social security cheats to reduce entitlements to all or the tiny tiny number of cases of elector fraud to disenfranchise the poor and BAME.

Dunblane and the Dangerous dogs act in the UK are related.

This is the sort of thing that fringe "hobbyist" activists do assuming they aren't paid agent provocateur's

> Your being very optimistic here

I'm not being optimistic or pessimistic, just pointing out a logical fallacy.