> Again, pretending that businesses maintaining an army of accountants and filing the relevant information for you as part of their service is "free" and "autom

> Again, pretending that businesses maintaining an army of accountants and filing the relevant information for you as part of their service is "free" and "automatic" then we do not see things equivalently. I'm not arguing that it's free. Nor am I arguing for sending information about every trade someone makes to the IRS. I'm arguing that since they have to generate a summary 1099-B anyways, why not just transmit it to the IRS electronically? There's no change in privacy, since presumably today you'd follow the law and submit the information from your 1099s to the IRS anyways.