I looked it up, the story is pretty hilarious.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act

Wow I’m surprised the reaction was to ban futures on just onions specifically due to some market manipulation occurring. Surely this kind of manipulation wasn’t restricted to just onions? It seems incredibly short sighted

It's bloody stupid is what it is. Knee-jerking like that is really terrible.

Knee-jerk is definitely the right term for this kind of legislation. I’m confused about how it has persisted. Do onion producers not want to be able to hedge out some price exposure?

> The Onion Futures Act is a United States law banning the trading of futures contracts on onions as well as "motion picture box office receipts"

Wut

To use a metaphor more appropriate to this site, US legal system is the smelliest, most hack-and-bodge-filled legacy codebase most people will ever interact with.

A long history of rapscallions.

Well, some kind of scallions anyway.

someone cornered the onion market and instead of of prosecuting them the government decided to just make the whole thing illegal.

it always takes just one a-hole to ruin it for everyone else

I guess? I would attribute this to poor regulation of the market as opposed to the market itself being bad