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>Crimes are only “easy” or “difficult” to prosecute because of the laws as they’re written. Yes and no. Yes in the sense that you can make crimes very easy to

>Crimes are only “easy” or “difficult” to prosecute because of the laws as they’re written. Yes and no. Yes in the sense that you can make crimes very easy to prosecute, no in the sense that doing so usually makes unobjectionable or even good behavior illegal in the process. Take insider trading for example. It would be very easy to simply make selling the stock of a company you work for, or are in any other way party to, outright illegal. But this would be bad for a lot of reasons; it would make it harder for businesses to compensate employees, it would encourage employees of successful companies to leave early taking important business knowledge with them, etc. Some behavior is simply harder to make illegal because it's harder to identify by its nature, which subsequently makes it harder to enforce laws against it.

AutistiCoder 2y ago
You could just say employees get a blackout period each year where they can’t buy or sell company stock.
- gruez 2y ago
  That's basically what SEC Form 144 is.
- derektank 2y ago
  Sure, there are always compromises that can be made and my point wasn't about insider trading specifically, it was that there are tradeoffs to consider. But let's take your example, how long is the blackout period and how long is the open period? I would contend that there is almost no open period short enough that a motivated insider couldn't trade on their non-public knowledge if they were "lucky" enough to have it during the open period, so you're kind of back at square one where you still need the SEC and DoJ to investigate and borderline cases will slip through the cracks. And for everyone else, they've lost some liquidity in case of personal emergency, etc. Again, this isn't to argue against blackout periods specifically, they might be good policy, just pointing out that law and law enforcement is not always easy.
dartos 2y ago
> Yes in the sense that you can make crimes very easy to prosecute, no in the sense that doing so usually makes unobjectionable or even good behavior illegal in the process I’m no legal expert, ofc, but I’d bet that a good enough legislature could strike a balance that society can be okay with. Whatever we have now isn’t that.

AutistiCoder 2y ago

You could just say employees get a blackout period each year where they can’t buy or sell company stock.

gruez 2y ago
That's basically what SEC Form 144 is.
derektank 2y ago
Sure, there are always compromises that can be made and my point wasn't about insider trading specifically, it was that there are tradeoffs to consider. But let's take your example, how long is the blackout period and how long is the open period? I would contend that there is almost no open period short enough that a motivated insider couldn't trade on their non-public knowledge if they were "lucky" enough to have it during the open period, so you're kind of back at square one where you still need the SEC and DoJ to investigate and borderline cases will slip through the cracks. And for everyone else, they've lost some liquidity in case of personal emergency, etc. Again, this isn't to argue against blackout periods specifically, they might be good policy, just pointing out that law and law enforcement is not always easy.

dartos 2y ago

> Yes in the sense that you can make crimes very easy to prosecute, no in the sense that doing so usually makes unobjectionable or even good behavior illegal in the process I’m no legal expert, ofc, but I’d bet that a good enough legislature could strike a balance that society can be okay with. Whatever we have now isn’t that.