I see parallels in California's ill-conceived desire to "protect" porn stars through mandatory condom use: http://www.forbes.com/2009/12/07/entertainment-porno

I see parallels in California's ill-conceived desire to "protect" porn stars through mandatory condom use: http://www.forbes.com/2009/12/07/entertainment-pornography-condoms-opinions-contributors-alexandre-padilla.html http://www.forbes.com/2009/12/07/entertainment-pornography-c... One of the arguments against Sarbane-Oxley is that it created incentives for smaller public companies to privatize and thus reduced the overall level of economic transparency -- just like forced condom use could cause the self-regulated adult industry to go underground. W.r.t. Sarbanes, it seems that the US government would better serve the "greater good" by creating a few standardized sets of accounting/audit/disclosure requirements from which public companies could pick. Presuming that investors actually valued disclosure laws, companies could pick a set of rules which they think would maximize their valuation. Let's say you are a small cap whose profitability would be significantly affected by the cost off complying with onerous SEC requirements. You could opt into a looser set of rules, but the market could punish you with a lower valuation as a result. Perhaps this lower valuation for less transparency/trust would be better than the reduced valuation from spending an extra $2.3M to comply with Sarbanes regulations. As a libertarian, I'm not keen on government involvement in markets, but the above proposal is a compromise of sorts.