As long as people have a choice between to invest or not invest in Madoff's pink sheets I don't see how government can step in.

That would not be my first choice for an example of successful government regulation...

Successful, not really (though Madoff is in jail and some billions of investor money recovered), but a pretty good example of a place where regulation is necessary. Maybe a better one for this particular issue would be University of Phoenix and other for-profit colleges. I think there's been some success with these bootcamps, but what if that dries up... what then is the difference? Good intentions?

Edit: not trying to be overly harsh on the bootcamps... I think they're pretty neat and a good idea on the whole. I also don't think they should escape the protections government regulation, done properly, can provide.

I don't know, would the Madoff situation have been as bad if those hapless investors had not been able to think to themselves: "Well if this is not on the level, then why have they been operating for decades now without apparent interference or objection from government regulators?"

When government regulation is incompetent or malicious but has a positive reputation nevertheless, it can amplify harm.

investing is gambling. If the investors didn't know what they were buying they shouldn't have bought it. If they were being lied to then it's a case of fraud.

I don't see anyone who wants to bail out people who bet on losing horses in the kentucky derby.

I don't see what any of that has to do with my point.

To reiterate, the Madoff scandal was a decades-long failure of government regulation. Regulation eventually prevailed, but only after thousands of investors were defrauded. The fact that Madoff was ostensibly regulated lowered the perceived risk of investment, thereby increasing the harm that was ultimately done.

Had the SEC not been in essence vouching for Madoff, many of his victims may have been more cautious and therefore avoided becoming his victims.

It was a fraud, and the comparison with gambling is a strawman. It's not a matter of bailing people out if they take one of these crash courses and don't profit from it, it's a matter of preventing the courses from defrauding people and holding them responsible if they do.

it would have been an excellent example for self regulation if we had let the banks fail. then go into bankruptcy, the surviving banks could then purchase the assets at reduced costs, if not enough banks survived to aquire the assets we could have helped the surviving banks purchase the assets via loans to them. instead we just bailed out the shitty banks and the good banks were penalized for their shrewd investing.

Another precondition: Consumers should know what they are buying and not merely rely on what the seller is telling them. In case of investments it takes years for consumers to actually realize that they have been duped. That is why effect government regulation in banking and various other sectors matters.

In case of bootcamps it hardly takes any time to understand if you are being duped or not getting money's worth. I honestly do not see much case for government regulation in this case.

For a 12-week boot camp, it is going to take attendees a fair bit longer than 12 weeks to learn that they've been duped. A school, by definition, takes in people who don't know what they're doing.

Sure, most HNers could tell in a day that they're being duped. But most HNers don't need the boot camps in the first place to get a tech-sector job.

What is difficult for ordinary people is difficult for government too. How can government figure out the usefulness (which is a not so tangible thing) of a bootcamp ?

If government stays out of this it is likely that the bootcamps will end up giving "free one week course" etc. This is very common in India where non regulated coaching and training centers tend to give a free one day to one week course which the pupil may convert into a paid one.