> “Others might do a bad thing, therefore you should be banned from doing a good thing” is not a logically coherent standard — yet that is the essential argumen

> “Others might do a bad thing, therefore you should be banned from doing a good thing” is not a logically coherent standard — yet that is the essential argument of the SEC and it’s “accredited investor” protections. No. That is not remotely close to summarizing the SEC’s stance on accredited investors or the regulations the SEC enforces to protect retail investors. The securities regulations are, at their core, a disclosure regime. They aren’t intended to police for bad investments and they aren’t intended to prevent you or I or anyone else from making stupid decisions with our money. They’re merely about how much information must be furnished to potential investors before they invest. That’s it. If you want to sell securities to everyday folks, they have to be registered. Full stop. Any unregistered sale is an exemption to the rule but anyone can register their securities for sale and provide potential investors with a prospectus and some basic information about the investment. Generally speaking the registration and disclosure requirements are eased or exempted for people with a higher income not because they’re smarter and can avoid bad investments or because they’re better situated financially to absorb the loss. It’s because they have the resources to do the diligence and hire people ask the questions and get the necessary information to make the investment. Think of it as outsourced compliance. Rather than the entity paying for the cost of registering the securities and everything that entails the investors pay for it up front. And that makes sense. If I have a question about Apple’s prospectus I can’t ring Tim Cook and ask for more information. What you see in the disclosures is what you get. But if I’m one of the 35 unaccredited investors in my friend’s company and I have a question I can absolutely call the CEO and get the answers. And now think about the middle ground: JFrog, for example, before they filed their S-1. If you or I invested $5,000 and we had a question about operations do you think we’d get answers? No way. If Elon Musk invested and he had the exact same question do you think he’d get answers? Of course.