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And lockdowns were instituted in 2020, in response to the spread of the coronavirus. They have been found to have caused something on the order of 141 times mor

And lockdowns were instituted in 2020, in response to the spread of the coronavirus. They have been found to have caused something on the order of 141 times more damage than they mitigated: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13571516.2021.1976051 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13571516.2021.19... The idea that we ought to impose blanket restrictions on millions of people, and thereby sacrifice their liberty, in the name of safety, is fundamentally misguided in my opinion, and certain goes against the core principles of liberal society. Liberal democracies have to find more rights-respecting ways to combat financial crime. Yes we know preemptively restricting financial interaction reduces some forms of financial harm, but what kind of damage does it do to society, when the only business entities capable of directly soliciting the public for capital, are those with revenues of over $100 million a year? What does that do to income inequality? I don't like people promising the moon to hype up speculative investments, but there are non-government solutions to this, like reputation markets. In fact we saw these non-government solutions working already: token investors in 2018, at the end of the brief period of reprieve from SEC restrictions, between 2016 and 2018, were unrecognizable from those that were giving a website with a white paper $40 million worth of cryptocurrency in 2016. This transformation occurred completely independently from any regulatory action. The collective intelligence of the market increased from hard-won lessons in the need to do due diligence, and the emergence of numerous sites for rating token sales (mind you, there was still a lot of room improvement in the curation market when the token sale experiment was shut down by the SEC. One promising avenue was Vitalik Buterin's proposal for DAICOs: https://ethresear.ch/t/explanation-of-daicos/465 https://ethresear.ch/t/explanation-of-daicos/465 which the market did not survive long enough to test). Regulations can obviously address some of these problems too, but any restriction on how consenting parties choose to interact is going to have massive unintended consequences, and in my estimation the unintended consequences do much more harm than what's alleviated by the regulations. Also worth mentioning is that the regulations that the SEC imposed on token sales went far beyond prohibiting issuers from promising big gains. They micromanaged how offerings were conducted, with inflexible cookie cutter rules that inhibit innovation and make the entire market dependent on a centralized gatekeeper, which is a monopolistic and fragile situation prone to systemic failures. One significant effect of this was that they eliminated the entire retail market's access to the early stage venture capital market. It's obvious to me that a free society should not tolerate this level of control being exerted on how people engage in voluntary interactions with other consenting adults. >>The fact that what's being sold are numbers generated on a computer is not the most relevant factor, and does not not warrant a different treatment than say titles of Florida swamp land. The fact that an investment offer required having a title to a swamp in the 1930s made it so it was less evident how illiberal laws that the SEC enforces stifle society. Now that any one with a computer can create digital art and offer it up as an investment on a programmatic contract system makes it clear that the laws passed in the 1930s, if maintained, are going to require increasingly draconian intrusions into private interaction to enforce. Similar to how if we as a society tried to continue enforcing obscenity laws into the internet age: effective enforcement would have required prohibiting public access to strong encryption, and heavy handed treatment of those found flouting the law, to make an example out of them for every one else.

AlexandrB 4y ago
> It's obvious to me that a free society should not tolerate this level of control being exerted on how people engage in voluntary interactions with other consenting adults. Except that's not what these markets are. Often this isn't a pair of equals trading assets, but an entity with excess resources and knowledge trading with an individual whose resources are far more limited. It seems like a repeating pattern in libertarian ideology to hand wave away differences in power/information as irrelevant when two "consenting adults" are transacting. But we don't think of many other interactions in society like this. In particular, power/information differences are a huge deal when talking about whether a sexual interaction is transgressive. Indeed, that's why the concept of "age of consent" exists for sexual interaction. Likewise there is a lot of disclosure required for "informed consent" when a doctor performs surgery on a patient. Why are efforts to equalize the information imbalance in financial markets different and somehow unnecessary?
- plorkyeran 4y ago
  The standard joke about libertarians is that the age of consent laws are the thing they care most about abolishing. Obviously that's a very uncharitable take, but they often aren't inconsistent about if power/knowledge imbalances are a problem; they're okay with them in both sexual matters and financial markets.
  - CryptoPunk 4y ago
    Age of consent has NOTHING to do with "power/knowledge imbalances". Libertarians have absolutely no problem with age of consent laws, so the fact that this is the standard joke about them, shows how misinformed anti-libertarians are.
- CryptoPunk 4y ago
  >>Except that's not what these markets are. Often this isn't a pair of equals trading assets, but an entity with excess resources and knowledge trading with an individual whose resources are far more limited. I don't want you to forcibly prevent large coalitions of people, like companies, from making any offer they want to me. By doing so, you are violating my right to free association, and assuming you know better than me what's best for me. I am not a child. I am able to draw upon the knowledge of millions of people, not least of all the companies that are the competitors of the soliciting company, and have just as much resources with which to counter-act any disinformation the soliciting company may publish, so I am not at any disadvantage versus any particular company. Public knowledge, like Wikipedia, or the reputations attached to particular products or companies, is a product of millions of minds, finding and filtering out information to produce an accurate picture of the world that can easily be digested by a typical person. It's a spontaneous bottom-up process that trumps anything that could be created by centralized committee. That's why Apple, despite being worth $2.8 trillion, is only able to convince individuals to buy its products by providing a product that is superior in quality. Individuals can draw upon the collective wisdom of society, and get a reliable indication of the real quality of Apple products. Massive companies, when they began floundering in delivering quality, have lost market share, for the same reason. See the rise of Japanese automakers versus American ones. >> Indeed, that's why the concept of "age of consent" exists for sexual interaction. Age of consent has nothing to do with "power/information differences". It has to do with the ability to provide genuine consent, which children, psychologically undeveloped as they are, are generally incapable of. The ability to consent is why we allow adults to vote, and have sex, for and with whoever they want, respectively. By your logic, adults would need guardians in elections, filtering their candidate choice, to protect them from political entities with "excess resources and knowledge" manipulating them. What you're advocating is a total rejection of a core principle of liberal democracy, which is that an individual is capable of making their own choices for their interests.

AlexandrB 4y ago

> It's obvious to me that a free society should not tolerate this level of control being exerted on how people engage in voluntary interactions with other consenting adults. Except that's not what these markets are. Often this isn't a pair of equals trading assets, but an entity with excess resources and knowledge trading with an individual whose resources are far more limited. It seems like a repeating pattern in libertarian ideology to hand wave away differences in power/information as irrelevant when two "consenting adults" are transacting. But we don't think of many other interactions in society like this. In particular, power/information differences are a huge deal when talking about whether a sexual interaction is transgressive. Indeed, that's why the concept of "age of consent" exists for sexual interaction. Likewise there is a lot of disclosure required for "informed consent" when a doctor performs surgery on a patient. Why are efforts to equalize the information imbalance in financial markets different and somehow unnecessary?

plorkyeran 4y ago
The standard joke about libertarians is that the age of consent laws are the thing they care most about abolishing. Obviously that's a very uncharitable take, but they often aren't inconsistent about if power/knowledge imbalances are a problem; they're okay with them in both sexual matters and financial markets.
- CryptoPunk 4y ago
  Age of consent has NOTHING to do with "power/knowledge imbalances". Libertarians have absolutely no problem with age of consent laws, so the fact that this is the standard joke about them, shows how misinformed anti-libertarians are.
CryptoPunk 4y ago
>>Except that's not what these markets are. Often this isn't a pair of equals trading assets, but an entity with excess resources and knowledge trading with an individual whose resources are far more limited. I don't want you to forcibly prevent large coalitions of people, like companies, from making any offer they want to me. By doing so, you are violating my right to free association, and assuming you know better than me what's best for me. I am not a child. I am able to draw upon the knowledge of millions of people, not least of all the companies that are the competitors of the soliciting company, and have just as much resources with which to counter-act any disinformation the soliciting company may publish, so I am not at any disadvantage versus any particular company. Public knowledge, like Wikipedia, or the reputations attached to particular products or companies, is a product of millions of minds, finding and filtering out information to produce an accurate picture of the world that can easily be digested by a typical person. It's a spontaneous bottom-up process that trumps anything that could be created by centralized committee. That's why Apple, despite being worth $2.8 trillion, is only able to convince individuals to buy its products by providing a product that is superior in quality. Individuals can draw upon the collective wisdom of society, and get a reliable indication of the real quality of Apple products. Massive companies, when they began floundering in delivering quality, have lost market share, for the same reason. See the rise of Japanese automakers versus American ones. >> Indeed, that's why the concept of "age of consent" exists for sexual interaction. Age of consent has nothing to do with "power/information differences". It has to do with the ability to provide genuine consent, which children, psychologically undeveloped as they are, are generally incapable of. The ability to consent is why we allow adults to vote, and have sex, for and with whoever they want, respectively. By your logic, adults would need guardians in elections, filtering their candidate choice, to protect them from political entities with "excess resources and knowledge" manipulating them. What you're advocating is a total rejection of a core principle of liberal democracy, which is that an individual is capable of making their own choices for their interests.