This is going to sound a bit stand-offish (or trollish), but I'm sorta glad that its hard to go public with a company. Thinking back to the slew of IPOs of yes

This is going to sound a bit stand-offish (or trollish), but I'm sorta glad that its hard to go public with a company. Thinking back to the slew of IPOs of yesteryear that were all of companies that had no product or reasonable revenue source, I'm glad that the current slew of new web 2.0/social networking/etc web companies can't all go public. Letting your stock be bought by the layman is a pretty serious event and shouldn't be done by just any company - They should have staying power. Right now, the people who are educated enough (VCs etc) to be taking the risk in investing in these companies do anyway, and although it slows the growth of these companies some because their influx of capitol is limited, it limits the amount of normal laypeople that get caught up in the hype and make bad investments. That however does bring up an interesting point. Should the gov't protect investors from their own silliness? Where should the gov't step in to protect people from bad investments by means of regulation? The more I think about the stock market and investing as it applies to the average person, the more I don't get it. Stocks seems so arbitrary - Its price is just a result of the collective sorta-independent opinions of all the people owning that stock. You don't get anything from that stock. If I buy some stock of some company, the company doesn't see that money, just some guy who sold it to me. And the stock market is so fickle to bad news or analyst "advice". </rant>