You can make the case that the regulations may or may not be the best for what society wants, but to say that they're somehow a moral obscenity seems silly to me.
I think it's strange to say that you're prevented from investing in a corporate structure because of legal limitations when the same legal limitations are what enable you to invest in the corporate structure in the first place. It's why I don't subscribe to this viewpoint on investing.
I agree with you on the gambling bit, to an extent. Government-backed lottery really preys on a certain class of people and I don't care for it so much. Private casino-style gambling is viewed by many as an entertainment outlet. Like drinking, for example. It's generally understood that you go to the casino to have a good time....and lose your money. Winning is understood to be an aberration. That doesn't stop people from blowing everything, though.
The only reason that people gamble in Vegas is because every other place created laws to protect fools from their own foolishness. Vegas, a city built by organized crime figures who normally had to operate illicitly, didn't.
Vegas is not the only location of legal casino gambling. It is by far the largest but there is significant gambling activity elswhere in the US.
Wikipedia mentions these markets:
1. Las Vegas Strip $5.550 billion
2. Atlantic City $3.943 billion
3. Chicago region $2.092 billion
4. Connecticut $1.448 billion
5. Detroit $1.36 billion
6. St. Louis $1.050 billion
7. Tunica Resorts, Mississippi $997.02 million
8. Biloxi, Miss. $833.50 million
9. Shreveport, La. $779.65 million
10. Boulder Strip (Las Vegas) $774.33 million
11. Reno, Nevada $715.23 million
12. New Orleans, La. $653.05 million
13. Downtown Las Vegas $523.82 million
14. Laughlin, Nevada $492.51 million
There are also numerous casinos on Indian reservations across the country.
I agree with you that the rules are not really about protecting ordinary people. At this point in history, it's about protecting one set of elites from another, with the side effect of (perhaps) protecting the entire economy from certain disasters.
If you want to drive your vehicle without a seatbelt, who am I to force you to? Your seatbelt choices have no impact on anyone else except you, right?!
Although the seat-belt thing does have some legitimacy, in that it keeps the drive in front of the wheel during an accident, allowing him to potentially keep some control over the car.
keeps the drive in front of the wheel during an accident
So you think passengers should not wear them?
Also: It's not 'negative impact' as a binary check, but looking at the massive cost of medical bills. And seatbelts are enforced on public roads, not private land. Investment is fundamentally a private action, which should only be restricted in very serious circumstances.
It's not?
> If you 'invest away' all your money, you can uninvest it the next day.
Not if it's gone.
What crazy definition of investing are you using where you have any reasonable* chance of losing all your money in less than a day?
Compare that to the near-100% chance of losing your money if you spend a single hour betting all of it at casino games.
*let's say 1% or greater
Your argument would hold some weight if you could provide some source or documentation for your assertions (that investment has no feedback loop and is therefore not addictive, or that the speed at which you lose your money on an investment is something that matters for the sake of this conversation).
Compare to buying and selling stocks repeatedly for an hour. Except for transaction fees you're probably not going to move more than a couple percent.
What do you want documentation for? Buying a stock for three months is about a million times slower of a feedback loop than a casino game, and that's an unarguable fact. When I search for anything about addiction to investing, all I find is articles talking about addiction to speculating, which is not the same thing.
And of course the speed matters, because the core of my argument was that you can't do something like blow your paycheck on investments. Bad investment might lessen your savings over the long term, but they're not going to turn a working adult into someone that costs society money the way a terrible car crash or gambling addiction can.
It's not only presumptuous to say "if someone's not rich, they must not be smart enough to invest", it's a self-fulfilling kind of thing, isn't it?
Nothing prevents people from gambling in Vegas. So clearly these laws are not about protecting fools from their own foolishness. No, the laws are about only one thing: making sure that the people who are in charge of the economic system, stay in charge. And it's not just these SEC laws, there are a wide variety of laws that secure the elite from competition by the peasants.
Whenever someone claims they're keeping you from doing something for your own good, who pretends to be your parent, they really are your master.