Owning individual stocks encourages lawmakers to think about how their legislation affects businesses, which is a good thing. I think stock trades should be disclosed online the same evening that they are placed, so that the information that senators and congressman are acting on is quickly disseminated.
You could say the exact same thing about decision makers at a public company, and yet they're barred from trading their company stock on information that wasn't public at the time of the trade.
> I think stock trades should be disclosed online the same evening that they are placed
That's not the normal insider trading rule. The normal insider trading rule is that you cannot trade on inside information at all.
> so that the information that senators and congressman are acting on is quickly disseminated.
The way to do that is to disseminate the information before making any trades, so everyone has an opportunity to decide whether they want to trade on it.
USA was never pure free market, the whole principle of check and balances is at odds of free market ideology. If you dont regulate market you get raw sewage in your rivers the next day its allowed.
Anyway, just imagine if the thin line of law that is currently barely stopping rich at the moment, just stopped applying all of the sudden...
Count to ten... pooof...
And we all hail our beloved King Bezos the first, and the return of feudalism.
Regulation isn't necessarily opposed to a free market, as long as the same rules apply to everybody. In fact, externalising your costs by polluting rivers could be considered anti-free market, because you're letting others pay for your costs. It's no different from theft.
Insider trading, however, is anti-free market, because you're relying on an information disparity to gain an advantage.
"Regulation isn't necessarily opposed to a free market"
Free market is like the shroudinger's cat, everyone has a different idea of where it is. In the other thread people were claiming that having a central bank is anti-free-market, but it's unclear how interest rate should be set and money supply be created and regulated.
> Regulation isn't necessarily opposed to a free market
In fact, it's required for any market to exist in the first place. Without regulation the concept of ownership goes out the window. "Free markets" would look like anarchy... and exactly as you lay out in the river analogy it would be utter chaos with everyone acting in their best interest like "damn the consequences!" - it's human nature.
Sorry if I'm coming off as abrupt here - I'm aggressively agreeing and building on your point... IMO the markets require regulation when all is said and done. People who point to a "free market" often do so to shield themselves from the same regulations/rules that are designed to keep the markets afloat just like Pelosi has done here. It's gotten to the point that the words "free market" are almost always a sign of a bad faith argument.
No, you're absolutely correct. I put my point far too weakly. Any truly unregulated market quickly becomes dominated by monopolies, cartels, scams, etc.
Nah - IMO you made a super strong point which is why I wanted to respond with my thoughts. I was just trying to explain why I was being pedantic pulling some of the words apart with my "sorry for abrupt/aggressively agreeing" comment =)
In general, an information disparity is good; it means you have done work to learn something and incorporate that into prices. If you are right, you deserve to be rewarded.
Insider trading is when you steal the information from someone else (often your employer) to make those trades - misappropriating value for yourself that does not belong to you.
A free market was probably around 1850 when you could pollute as much as you wanted and send children to work in mines. The word "free market" is basically nonsense. To most people "free market" means "I can do whatever I want but the state protects me from others doing thins I don't like"
are we ? awful lot of rent seeking and cronyism in this "free market" outside of a few fringe auctions there has never ever been a competitive market ever.
"We are a free-market economy" is simply not a defense of congress members being able to trade individual stocks with no restrictions. Free-market economies still take measures against insider trading, still place limits on how and when high-ranking executives can trade company stock. Placing restrictions on how congress members can trade, when they have access to material non-public information, is totally compatible with a free-market economy.
They do have to report their positions. Not sure if that's a "restriction" per se, but that is something that insiders have to do as well, and it's something retail traders do not have to do.
If they are using insider information so effectively, anyone is free to copy their moves, no?
EDIT: That they only report 45 days after the fact is indeed a significant difference from company insiders and severely limits how well someone could profit by following along.
Not sure about congress but for corporate insiders and major investors the reporting is quarterly so likely not as useful if trading on inside info (which tends to disseminate faster).
Having worked for a couple of publicly US-listed companies, when you have access to material data you had to adhere to strictly defined trade windows, among a load of other things. Being in Supply Chain, with obvious access to forecasts and inventories, I always fall under insider trading rules. Why law makers would be exempt is beyond me.
Not simply "exempt", unless you're referring specifically to the trade window part. There is in fact a law making it illegal to trade on insider information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STOCK_Act Arguably it did not go far enough.
I just don't think Congress has much in the way of insider information most of the time. Antitrust litigation would be one example where they do, but what else? Company insiders by contrast almost by definition have insider information.
One could make the case that the ability to influence the market itself is even more powerful than just knowing some inside data. And we are not even talking about things like defense contracts.
They should recuse themselves from any vote involving an industry that they have a more than trivial amount of stock in. Do you expect someone to restrict Big Tech when they have Facebook and Google stock?
If some Congressperson went short the market and then tanked the market though some statement that would indeed be very bad! Has anything like that ever happened? That would presumably nuke that person's reputation with costs far greater than whatever financial gains could be had.
If they're long the market and then boosting the market... I mean, isn't that what we want? You'd have to go further than a blind trust even and ban owning equities at all.
They should have to report their positions well in advance.
If I want to buy/sell Boeing stock and I'm a Senator, I should have to publicly file that intention three months in advance, and not be able to undo it. Those filings should immediately be public in a data feed.
I'd expect to see a "Congressional stock purchases index fund" arise, and it'd be fascinating to see how it performed.
> Academic research revealed that senators' stock purchases underperformed the benchmark during six-month intervals by 17 basis points between 2012 and March 2020
All sorts of trading strategies you could try out on a full, in-advance data feed, though.
Only follow the trades of those in leadership, give special attention to transactions involving defense contractors by members of the Committee on Armed Services, etc.
I don't doubt that Congress has its share of confident morons to skew the numbers downwards, but you might be able to identify people who somehow manage to make better moves.
Nice idea, but for this to work, you'd also have require that previously announced intended trades MUST be followed through within a given window. Without out, this is way to game stocks without spending anything at all.
How about just reporting trades within a day or two of when they occur? As opposed to reporting months after the fact? Just publicize the order flow. This way there's no weaseling out of the fact that yes you did make such and such a trade literally a day before some government announcement.
"We will put together a panel to put together a committee to review these technologies. Upon sufficiently reviewing said technologies we will institute new rules. Current target is by 2050"
No. Three months in advance is just as stupid as a year past. It gives people opportunity to manipulate prices.
"Day of" should be the rule. Basically, have them trade in the public eye. You could subscribe to congressional stock feeds to see what they're personally buying and selling as it happens.
Three months in advance without the ability to cancel it subjects them to risk if they're trying to trade on insider info; the info could leak, change, be affected by something unexpected, etc.
Letting them do "day of" doesn't really help; if you know Boeing's gonna get the contract at 3:00pm you could just do the buy at 2:59pm. No one has time to react.
An effective law would require all elected representatives to identify themselves and their close relatives (i.e. parents, siblings and children) as such to their banks and brokers, with the banks and brokers having to maintain an instant feed exposing all trades executed on the accounts of these people.
As a software developer at a law firm, I had to have all of my stock trades pre-approved by the firm just in case there was a conflict, regardless of if I had any actual access to or knowledge of material relevant to the company stock's being traded. Since I invest mostly in indexes, it wasn't much of an issue for me but I had a coworker who had several of his trades blocked without explanation other than there was a conflict. Funny how software developers with no actual access to insider information, just the potential for access, are more restricted than members of Congress who have actual access to such information.
this rings true for me -- restrictions are placed on those that cannot defend themselves.. all of financial reporting is heading in the wrong direction, due in no small part to the operators of the system, not Mr and Miss Main Street
> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
I mean she's worth over $100 million and her husband is a professional investor, it's not surprising they'd want to keep restrictions off of themselves. It's shameful, but it's not surprising.
A while back there was some noise around potential favorable treatment she gave Visa around the time of their IPO. [1] Congresspeople really should be forced to stop all trading activity while serving in office, aside from maybe putting things in index funds. And have term limits.
It it really shameful though? As you said, it’s not surprising. And it’s not surprising because this kind of thing is so common in positions of power. It’s so common that I have started to admit to myself, after wrestling with the shame, that this is one of the key organizing principles of our society; that the primary purpose of attaining power is to leverage it to benefit yourself personally. If seemingly everyone agrees on this principle, left and right, then where does the shame come in? Why shouldn’t I seek power to enrich myself and my friends? Everyone else is doing it. No one gets punished for doing it. That’s the way we have decided that our society works.
Society is worse off for it, probably, sure. But if our society doesn’t care about our society, why should I? Is that shameful? I used to think so but I’m not really that convinced anymore.
> Why shouldn’t I seek power to enrich myself and my friends?
> Society is worse off for it, probably, sure.
You answered your own question. You are directly and knowingly contributing to the worsening of society and you should feel ashamed for it. If anything you should feel shame for your lack of self awareness here
But why? Telling someone they should be "ashamed of [their] own lack of self-awareness" sounds like you don't know how to answer the question, so you just hurl insults instead.
History has shown over and over and over that relying on people to be benevolent when they have outsized power is foolish. That they almost never have this "shame" you think everyone should have. I find this to be far more foolish: consolidating power into someone's hands with the assumption that they will rely on shame or pride to guide them towards using the power for good. We should all acknowledge humans are tribalist and self-interested, and limit the amount of power they can have to exploit. The way I see it, if you give them the power and they "misuse" it, that's as much your fault as theirs.
The person this article is about (Nancy Pelosi) is currently speaker of the house - the single most powerful person in the house and the person who, annually, sets rules on house procedure to outline what actions are appropriate and not. She has the power to unilaterally end this practice and chooses not to.
Additionally - we're talking about a pool of 435 people here - not thousands or millions. Individual house reps standing up and personally pledging to trade individual stocks does happen and usually gets accolades in the news. This is a case where the scale is so small that you acting benevolently against society has the power to sway society to act better.
So I think this particular scenario is a lot different than being a good person who properly separates their recycling (if that's a thing where you are) among the millions who can't be assed and a system that has no real expectation that you will.
Huh. And yet Pelosi chooses to enrich herself instead of benefiting society. Which moral framework does this fit more neatly into?
Maybe what you think of as morality is actually just a set of dictum from powerful people that helps them enrich themselves at the expense of you. There's absolutely no cosmic or objective moral basis for our insider trading laws one way or the other. It just so happens that they conveniently enrich the people who make the laws at the expense of everyone else. Again, what moral framework does this fit into? People acting selfishly, or people acting in the interest of some nebulously defined "society?"
Power is given by the people. If we can culturally all accept that enriching oneself at the expense of many others is morally wrong then that's the moral framework we should judge by. Life is _not_ a zero sum game, and it doesn't _have_ to be thought of that way. We can choose to try to do good for the most amount of people, instead of allowing the most amount of good to go to the least amount people (least here meaning smallest population, I suppose 1% is another way to read)
Kinda? I know that's the supposed cliche, but it doesn't really ring true. The "people's" will as defined by some collective subset of the population has certainly been a powerful influence at times, but it's far from a concept that is simply "given by the people." I don't think Pol Pot's power was given by the people. Hitler's wasn't. Xi Jinping's isn't.
And even Nancy Pelosi's isn't given in the way you imply. Through a strong network of bribing and brainwashing, our entire political system leaves us with the choice of empowering corrupt militaristic theocrats or a party that mostly uses tax dollars to bribe voters. I think a very good response to this situation is "I don't like what Pelosi is doing, but I would really hate what a republican would do in her place." And that doesn't sounds like people have much power at all.
I think we can argue that Hitler's power _was_ indeed given by the people. Hitler tried to overthrow the government in the 20s with a march on Munich [0]. He ultimately failed because he didn't have enough support and was driven out. After this incident he pledged to get into power the legal way, and by that time he _did_ have the support of the people. He appealed to the masses. If people did not support his rise to power and immediate control of the government through the Enabling Act [1] they could have marched on the government themselves to try and overthrow him. Higher ups supported him, and the working class supported him.
My history is a little outdated and hazy, but my recollection was that the Nazi Party suppressed voting via violence in 1933. By then, it was clear that if people marched on the government, they would be risking their lives. What little consent Hitler did have before then (which was never a majority) was not based on the views that he ultimately carried out. The people never had any say in anything ever again after 1933. I could grant you the notion that the people under free will chose the Nazi Party in a non-majority way for about a year. But after 1933, dissent was a death sentence.
I think it's pretty rough to say Hitler was given power from the people in the sense that Rousseau would use the phrase.
I think this is a fair argument but one I don't really subscribe to myself. A strong argument in favor of this behavior being morally justified is that Nancy Pelosi is doing it and hasn't been voted out - but I think a strong argument against it is that people are complaining about it vocally. At the end of the day if we allow it to happen it's going to happen and if we disallow it we stop it - whether that allowance or denial aligns with "societal morals" is a pretty murky question with a lot of people having different opinions.
My personal opinion is that this is immoral - and we're having this discussion because someone thought it was so immoral that they were motivated to write an article about how much they dislike it - but people write all sorts of articles so that's not a proof at the end of the day... Really, there are some things we can mostly (not all) agree are immoral like murder and rape - but even that isn't universally held (or agreed on to the same limit) because, well, some people do it. So yes - societal morals are pretty vague to define and I'm sure there are some people that feel fervently that House reps trading individual stocks is highly beneficial to society - but I feel like the majority of folks are on the other side on this one.
But you're now relying on the notion that a majority of a subset of people's opinions define moral good and bad. This has never really been true, at least in terms of majorities making objectively good decisions (moral ones are a little harder to gauge). The US is filled with examples of where the majority was probably wrong, starting with the original War of Independence.
I don't think you'll find many fully informed people who thinks that house reps trading on insider info is good (myself included), unless they're personally beneficiaries of that system.
But this discussion isn't really about that. The original guy asked "why shouldn't she do this?" She can do it. She benefits from doing it. No one will stop her. Why is it immoral for her to do it? Which is a totally different thing from "the majority of informed people don't want her to do it." To that end, she is behaving exactly as should be expected of her given the amount of power she has.
The only way as far as I know to get people to not make decisions that are bad for the world but good for them is to not let them have the power to make that decision. The US government has become an atrocity of corrupt and consolidated power. That's the problem, IMO. And so long as its leaders can spy freely on Americans, can take 40% of their income, can deny them rights, etc, then this is what happens.
1. I believe so as the house has a pretty wide latitude to set procedural and behavioral rules for members - this could run into issues if it forced any house members into legitimate hardship or violated religious freedoms.
2. The House Committee on Ethics[1] can recommend a few remedies including Censure and Expulsion - whether these are actually enacted is decided by a general floor vote by the whole House of Representatives.
3. The same body - the House Committee on Ethics would instigate an investigation into any suspected wrong-doings.
The House essentially has an internal police force - but whatever the Ethics Committee finds is then brought to a general house floor vote to decide on punishment. If the populace suspected the house was acting immorally the remedy is to change the representatives - these investigations are supposed to root out extreme violations of generally agreed norms in the short term, but a sea change requires the election of house members that will advocate for the new norms.
> If the populace suspected the house was acting immorally the remedy is to change the representatives - these investigations are supposed to root out extreme violations of generally agreed norms in the short term, but a sea change requires the election of house members that will advocate for the new norms.
This is my whole point. The Congress knows this is an issue. The House Committee on Ethics knows this is an issue. The people know this is an issue. The members of Congress who have not moved on this issue were just reelected by the people, and have now telegraphed that they will not solve this issue in the future. It will not be solved, yet these representatives will be reelected by the people again and again. The House Committee on Ethics will not investigate. If you engage in this behavior you get richer and nothing bad happens to you. If you don't engage in this behavior, you are leaving money on the table and the only person you hurt is yourself and a nebulous, distributed entity we call "society". Our former President even pardoned a Congressman for the very crime of using his privileged position to facilitate insider trading for his family! The power of the pardon is one of the most solemn expressions of the values a society holds. Taken as a whole, this tells me that actually, American society does not consider this to be a problem. So if shame is an emotion derived from the violation of societal norms, I am only asking why this should be shameful? Insider trading is in accordance with societal norms.
I wouldn't expect the election to immediately boot all the congressfolk out who engage in this activity - and it is a tacitly accepted activity... greed is (much to the detriment of society) generally considered a virtue in America. However, we have seen several upcoming politicians specifically pledge not to engage in this behavior and get big boosts from their declarations. I think that society is in a place where this behavior is generally considered unacceptable but that it will take a while for that to catch up with congressfolk. I think it is perfectly rational for the behavior to be shamed since, while people aren't overthrowing the government over it - there is a general disapproval of the action.
> If you don't engage in this behavior, you are leaving money on the table and the only person you hurt is yourself and a nebulous, distributed entity we call "society".
I disagree with this statement because I think it is putting too much necessity on maximizing personal gain - there are plenty of reasons not to engage in insider trading and refusing to do so doesn't "hurt" you.
>If anything you should feel shame for your lack of self awareness here
This is no place for these kinds of statements. Parent posed a question that can 100% be read charitably. In a system where all incentives promote individualism and self-interest, why should we care about others indeed.
To care about others is socialism. Or collectivism. Identity politics is probably part of the issue here, but I'm more interested in what other smarter people than me have to say, free from being shamed.
To not care about others is psychopathy. They typically don't care what others think save for how it impacts their ability to do what they want and this is generally seen as a social net negative. Systems that incentivize psychopathy deserve to be dismantled.
Caring about others is normally called "empathy," not socialism.
A trivial example of this would be any example of someone caring about someone else for non-selfish reasons prior to humans inventing socialism. Take your pick.
The parent asked if it was shameful to think that way and I responded, yes it is. I'm not going around looking to fling insults, I think it is important to take feedback constructively and being honest is important to constructive criticism.
> you should feel ashamed for it. If anything you should feel shame
Trying to guilt-trip or shame people on HN for their views is absolutely against the HN guidelines[1] - "Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation" "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive" "When disagreeing, please reply to the argument" and so on.
I can admit, the initial wording can sound like I am trying to guilt trip. I'll try to be better about that in the future. But to elaborate more I am trying to respond to the question "Is it shameful though?"
> You answered your own question. You are directly and knowingly contributing to the worsening of society and you should feel ashamed for it.
That doesn't really answer the question though. If knowingly making society worse were the standard for feeling shame, I think I'd be too depressed and shame-ridden to even get out of bed. I mean, you want to talk about damaging society: every single day I get into my car and burn fossil fuels on my commute to/from work, which is essentially slowly killing the planet. I know it's bad for society, but I do it anyway. Knowingly. On purpose. Can you imagine how psychopathic I am to treat society with such casual disregard?
As another poster put it: "To feel shame is an emotional reaction to violating standards of morality."
What I'm saying is an actor in American society is beholden to the standards of morality as defined by the leaders of its community, voted into office by the people in its community. It's been shown for a while now that this behavior is accepted, expected, and tolerated. It's not only unpunished when caught, but rewarded. This is the standard of morality in my community. If shame is tied to a standard of morality, which is orthogonal as to whether it helps or harms society, then there is no basis for shame for this behavior.
First I wanted to say I'm not trying to guilt trip you or anything, I admit I wrote my response quickly and didn't think it would attract this much attention. So just wanted to let you know I value your views and am not trying to put you down!
> That doesn't really answer the question though. If knowingly making society worse were the standard for feeling shame, I think I'd be too depressed and shame-ridden to even get out of bed. I mean, you want to talk about damaging society: every single day I get into my car and burn fossil fuels on my commute to/from work, which is essentially slowly killing the planet. I know it's bad for society, but I do it anyway. Knowingly. On purpose. Can you imagine how psychopathic I am to treat society with such casual disregard?
I think you bring up a good idea here. I recently came across a lecture by Jaron Lanier that discusses this kind of thinking and how to reason about it.
> I came up with an image to help me think about who the beneficiary is of our activities, whether we're engineers or writers or anything else, and I called this the 'circle of empaty'.... Those who are inside the circle are the beneficiaries of what you do, and anything inside the circle deserves your empathy. Things outside the circle perhaps don't deserve your antagonism but on the other hand they're not the beneficiaries of what you do. So I hope that people believe that all human beings should be inside the circle. That's not always the case; there are racists and homophobes and many other varieties of ideological people who would like to put _some_ human beings outside the circle, but I think decent people can agree that humans belong inside... Typically liberals wish to make the circle larger and conservatives wish to make the circle smaller... If you make the circle too small you become cruel and destructive... and if you make the circle too big so that all living things are inside the circle you can't live because your body kills bacteria all the time, you essentially become incompetent
I would recommend listening to at least the beginning of the talk where he goes over this idea because I think a similar approach can help with regards to contributing to environmental issues and such. For instance we can reason that it would be actually more harmful to us as a society to morally judge people who drive to the grocery store to buy themselves food so they can eat, because if people don't do that they can surely end up in a situation where they are sick and unhealthy.
On the other hand lets look at the situation we see here and ask: Would it be more harmful for society to continue to allow a small group of people who can effectively change the rules of a society be able to profit financially from these changes? I think again in this case, yes it would be more harmful!
We have to think about how things can get out of hand if we do not have the right checks and balances. Like Jaron mentions in his lecture, conservatism and the shrinking of the circle can go out of control like we saw with Germany after the first World War. We should aim to have _all of society_ within this circle of empathy, and not just _me and my family and friends_. If we can legally disincentivize people in power from shrinking their circle of empathy in these areas I think it is a net benefit for us as a society and sets a foundation for what we should find morally worth our empathy.
But who set this standard of morality? Society, right? What I’m saying is this shame imposed from society worked before. But as I look around, I don’t see that the prevailing moral standard is that we must all work for the betterment of society. Society doesn’t even feel this is a worthy thing. I don’t agree that there is a moral imperative in American society to work for the betterment of everyone.
That's head on. People adjust their behaviour to the one they see in their peers, including public figures.
This is quite likely a slow moving change going on unnoticed for decades, until it crosses a threshold were it starts to become quite visible. And possibly a major danger to society as we know it.
The big question is are we before or after the threshold, and can we reverse the process anyway?
Ask not what your country can do for you, ask how you can get just enough power to amass and horde wealth while masquerading it on behalf of the benefit of your countryfolk.
I am not American but I do live in a country that has a government. It's curious to see stories of people going from <citizen grunt> to <elected official> and then using their power and insight for personal gain, while never capitalizing on opportunity to force the changes that were campaigned on, when presented with unique chances to force the issue to be resolved.
There's such a focus on "getting it right, the first time" instead of "anything will be better than nothing, and we can re-iterate on this in the future".
An issue with government is much like the issues you face at work every day; too much focus on introducing "new", and seemingly never enough time to evaluate and improve "existing".
This isn't mere power seeking. This violates the principle of 'equality under the law,' since the law has this specific exclusion. The problem isn't that Pelosi is exploiting the loophole, it's that Pelosi both _controls_ AND exploits the loophole. Royalty isn't exercising 'freedom' when they exploit advantages over the citizenry.
They aren’t royalty though. They are elected representatives. If elected representatives behave like royalty and keep getting elected, isn’t that an expression of the preferences of the electorate?
This is the sort of comment that’s suited to a different forum. HN users will react in an emotional manner so the detail of your comment will not receive attention. You might as well have said “I think I should exploit people” because the responses will treat it that way.
See, we more or less structured the US on the Hobbesian state of nature, wherein we're all supposed to be greedy, self-centered, and violent. This was rife with induction and failed to account for a litany of examples that simply weren't present. It's old hat that never got scraped off, but now it's baked into literally everything we do.
But because the fundament of our system is developed on that conception of humanity, it contributes to the conditioning of the people laboring under it. My favorite thought experiment: My ex used to accuse me of cheating, I'd have to explain myself, she'd go through my phone, we'd argue; at that point, being punished for the crime, I had may as well cheat to reap the benefits of my just desserts. The Hobbesian affair is a slight alteration in the logical apparatus there - you're not being greedy so you won't be rewarded.
I'll credit the system this: I suspect a more "social" (via Rousseau) view would have immense difficulty in defense against the Hobbesian man. We're by nature, and the dint of our calling as humans (cooperative apes) intrinsically trusting. Granted, there are some conditionals, and some conditioning that as we grow wise, a skepticism emerges. To me that says a system that doesn't employ the Hobbesian mode, is highly susceptible to it. If your institutions are, historically, pristine in execution for a long period the social expectation would eventually gravitate to certainty. When some bad actor is seated, a little sophistry could go a long way in creating a system of exploitation. Something like that...
Most people, I think, and this is borne out by my own experience - just want left alone to their lives. The chains aren't uncomfortable until you find their limits, and as long as you don't reach that you're hardly aware of them after spending a life captive in their grasp. This coupled with intrinsic trust, and the world's inundations, add liberally debt and the construction of the social standard of "good" and "success" and you've managed to culminate a great ethical slavery.
Ultimately though, whether we're fighting fire with fire, the fact remains that we're pressing people to do exactly as you did. Offering a free ascension on a staircase made of the backs of mankind, blaming those who fail to acede to it on a moral basis, and complaining about the living who one tromps upon.
As to organizing, that's a joke. We've really not trialed any other approach at scale sans Marxism, itself a joke. And collectivization of small elements hardly marks a real difference when it's plainly easy to exploit.
> Most people, I think, and this is borne out by my own experience - just want left alone to their lives.
I really found your entire comment very insightful. To the above quote, most people do want to be left alone, the rest want to tell those people what to do.
you've spent too much time in the 18th century and have fallen into the trap of making vast hand-wavy claims about humanity without a shred of evidence. Stop it.
What you're saying is part of a long and broad conversation. Read Machiavelli.
> The general theme of "The Prince" is of accepting that the aims of princes – such as glory and survival – can justify the use of immoral means to achieve those ends.
Really the question to ask yourself isn't "Why shouldn’t I seek power to enrich myself and my friends?", the question is "What is the best method to achieve happiness for myself and my friends?"
Yeah what happens is because we have no term limits these Senators stay in office for 100 years and amass huge amounts of insider info, its an incredibly debased system at this point.
What does one have to do with the other? Do you have valid reasons for thinking corruption of Senators or Representatives would be less with term limits? I think the level of corruption would not change with term limits and there are some negatives with term limits. I don't see how it would help.
With limits on how long they can hold the office, there will be a much shorter time span in which they can collect and act on inside information. There will also be a much shorter time span in which they can form relationships with these companies that could lead to the collection of inside information.
In my opinion it's not a solution but it is another way to limit the amount of this kind of trading.
Pelosi has been in congress since the 80s. I do not think congress-critters will support higher ethical standards that prohibit them from profiting off of insider information if they think that means putting themselves in a straight-jacket for the rest of their lives. The ability to profit off insider information is probably a reason some of our congress-critters stay in office rather than retiring and pursuing goals elsewhere.
Through the 80s and 90s, I recall politicians and talking heads using the phrase "...even the appearance of impropriety". I'm tempted to conclude there's something telling about the way this quaint phrase seems to have disappeared.
EDIT: not saying term limits are the answer, just that I can see the relationship suggested.
My contention is that we have very corrupt politicians leading the country. That corruption will not go away with the imposition of term limits. It's a bad response to the problem of corruption. I don't know what would solve the problem but strongly feel term limits is not the solution. I know you aren't saying that term limits are the answer; I'm clarifying my position.
I do agree that politicians aren't even trying to avoid the appearance of impropriety. Their response seems to be that in the absence of absolute proof of impropriety then any appearance of it is ok.
A term limited politician will want to secure their future and will go into the job with the knowledge that their time is limited no matter how well they do the job. They’ll seek compensation. The corruption will morph to adapt to the new reality of term limitations but the amount of corruption will not decrease.
Neither worse nor better. Just different form of corruption. Term limits is not a good way to fight corruption.
The Democrats held the House of Representatives for something like 40 years straight until 1994. You had famous scandals involving entrenched Democratic Congressmen. In 1994 Republicans made term limits a rallying point and they took over the House. Both parties have since jostled for control of the House. But when Republicans had the power they did not impose term limits. It’s just a rallying point and will do nothing to stop corruption. There may be good reasons for term limits but anti-corruption isn’t one of them.
FWIW, I agree with you. For a brief time in the 90s, the topic was au courant, and my opinion was that is was a smoke-screen against campaign finance reform.
>> Do you have valid reasons for thinking corruption of Senators or Representatives would be less with term limits?
I like to think people's terms limit would be reached before they get jaded and cynical.. At the very least, it would reduce the number of years (and hence the total amount of money) lobbyists, etc. would be focused on them. Someone that might think $100K in lobbyist money isn't worth the risk of repercussions, might think $1M (over time) is.
I believe otherwise. A term limited politician will look for ways to secure their future. I think with term limits we'd end up with even more legislation effectively written by lobbyists. Think Robert Rubin type corruption on an even wider scale than it is today.
I don't think we _could_ end up with more legislation written by lobbyists. It's pretty much 100% already.
I think at the worst, we'd be right where we are now...
Plus with term limits, at least we'd be rid of them, instead of having them perpetually come back...
However, the litmus test would probably be if we actually get term limits..
After all, if they're that corrupt, they won't vote against their own interests.
Term limits shift power away from the representatives that the public has democratically chosen and instead empowers those bureaucrats who serve in government for 40 or 50 years. Please see:
"Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government"
If you want democratically elected representatives to be able to gain power over the machinery of government, then you should advocate for longer terms, without limits. If every Senator was elected for 15 years, we would get better government.
True, though the ratio of 15 to 45 is better than the ratio of 2 to 45. I'm assuming there is some law of diminishing returns here, that hasn't set in at 2 or 4 years, but has set in by 15 years. In other words, a politician who has to run for office every 2 years is powerless in the face of civil servants, whereas a political who runs for office every 15 years definitely has the time needed to force a showdown with civil servants, whenever civil servants are acting in a rogue manner.
I'd ask you to consider the possibility that it doesn't matter how long an individual serves, what does matter is whether that person's party can lose power. It's an argument explored by Achen and Bartels, and I wrote about it here:
> what does matter is whether that person's party can lose power.
With 15 year terms, that can't happen on any reasonable timetable, either. If you maintained the three-class system, you’d have 1/3 of the Senate elected every five years. If you kept roughly equal sets every two years you'd have 2/15 (13-14 out of 100) every 2 years.
The risk of losing power could potentially happen every month, if you have elections every month. Electing 3 people a month for 15 years would give a legislature of 540 people, the size of the combined houses of the USA Congress and close in size to the British parliament. I'd suggest every voter gets 2 votes and then the top 3 vote-getters are then elected. Of course, when one side has a large lead, it means they are safe for a few months (if you've got 30 person lead, then you know you are safe for at least 10 months). And also, such a system suggests the whole polity voting for national figures, without representation of specific geographic regions. As with software, it is a set of tradeoffs about what kind of system one wants to has. The important thing to realize is that most of the current problems with democracy can be fixed, by adapting a different architecture, which would have different starting premises. The goal would be to have a government that functions well and which has mechanisms of accountability that limit corruption and abuse.
> The risk of losing power could potentially happen every month, if you have elections every month. Electing 3 people a month for 15 years would give a legislature of 540 people, the size of the combined houses of the USA Congress
The proposal was for Senators specifically. This is clearly different, but it's not clear what it is. So, is your proposal:
(1) to abolish the Senate, and do this in the House, or
(2) to abolish the House, and do this to the Senate, maintains equal representation (540 not being divisible by 50 makes this problematic),
(3) to abolish the House, and do this to the Senate without equal representation, or
(4) to do this to the House, but retain the Senate as is, or
(5) something else?
Note that #3 and arguably #1 are outside the power of even a Constitutional Amendment, since the power to amend the Constitution explicitly does not extend to removing equal representation of states in the Senate.
> Of course, when one side has a large lead, it means they are safe for a few months
A 4 seat (<1%) lead is safe for 6 mmonths. A 16 seat (3%) lead is safe for 15 months. A margin the proportional size of that after the 2018 House election in the US would take losing every seat up for election for 3 years, 9 months to lose. These are small margins; a large lead is absolutely secure for lot longer than “a fee months”.
> The important thing to realize is that most of the current problems with
I’m fully behind that. Long legislative terms just is a very bad idea that is hyperfocused on one (overstated) problem and which makes (almost independent of what else you try to do alongside) most other problems worse.
"A margin the proportional size of that after the 2018 House election in the US would take losing every seat up for election for 3 years, 9 months to lose"
You make it sound like that is a long time. In Britain, the Fixed-term Parliaments Act of 2011 makes it unlikely there will be many elections held at less than 5 years.
But having a safe majority that is locked in for longer than 5 years can bring benefits. The evidence is overwhelming that the current majority is, at all times, ignorant, irrational, biased, bigoted and impulsive. Therefore, we should want all real power to be in the hands of the long-term majority, not the current majority. Big changes should come from majorities that manage to survive for several years.
I believe you are a software developer? So you should understand the concept that a signal can be derived from a noisy source, given enough time.
It is compared to the claim that “a large margin is safe for a few months”.
> In Britain, the Fixed-term Parliaments Act of 2011 makes it unlikely there will be many elections held at less than 5 years.
Yes, but it assures that 100% of seats will be elected in 5 years, and that no majority is safe for longer than that and none takes more than a majority of the elections in that time to overturn.
> The evidence is overwhelming that the current majority is, at all times, ignorant, irrational, biased, bigoted and impulsive
No, the evidence is that effectively representative, responsive democracies produce the best results for their people. The US mostly fails on effective representation, and the proposed change would compound that by making it also fail on responsiveness.
> Big changes should come from majorities that manage to survive for several years.
Sure, maybe, that's why procedures that require long (e.g., multistage, with legally or practically mandatory delays) process for major changes arguably make sense.
But rendering any substantial majority effectively immune to change once established defeats the purpose of that. If the argument is correct at all, it is that big changes should come from legislative majorities that survive for an extended time because they represent a durable majority in the electorate.
I'm convinced we need more people without answers going in in government.
It bugs me that every representative we elect is expected to have their own plan other than to "represent". Fast talk and snappy speeches are cheap. Willingness to acquire deep understanding, be challenged, and even sometimes put your own convictions aside for your constituents, and the systems that exist to serve them? That's hard.
The claim is that civil servants are the bad guys and yet somehow people we make into civil servants would somehow "fight for us" - its the same line of bullshit that politicians have been hawking for decades in America.
I'm an outsider! They yell, as they have private meetings for billions.
Pelosi has been in office for 18 terms... so how hasn't she been able to "fix the system"?
It depends on what you mean by power. She has only as much power as her caucus will afford her. The role of Speaker has it's limits, and she's not really popular enough in party politics to sway the zeitgeist.
No, the claim is that civil servants are not directly responsible to the constituency. Like it or not, Representatives are elected every two years by their constituents. Representatives get to do what they want as long as their constituency is ok with it (within the bounds of their own body's rules, which they get to vote on)
Gerrymandering is an issue, but it's actually the solution to greater problems. Gerrymandering itself is performed by elected officials who, again, are responsible to their constituency. The practice can be seem undemocratic, but the two party system is an eventuality, if one party starts gaining too much power and popularity then people will just start joining that party which will create a schism which will in turn create another party. We cannot guard against a two party system.
That's an interesting idea and it makes a certain kind of sense, but I would hate to be 17 though when my senator gets elected and be stuck with someone I hate an didn't vote for until I'm 32.
That's just it though, once we start considering how to fix one issue, we realize that a particular design decision is part of a wider architecture, and it's impossible to change the one design decision without undermining the whole architecture. It's like software, in a sense, that if you try to quickly patch a system, with no regard for the assumptions of the system, you will end up with tech debt. That implies that actually fixing the problems with our democracy requires a hard re-think of certain fundamentals. If you're at all interested, I plan to spend the next year writing about this issue:
> That's just it though, once we start considering how to fix one issue, we realize that a particular design decision is part of a wider architecture, and it's impossible to change the one design decision without undermining the whole architecture
'Sokay, the architecture is fundamentally flawed, in part because it was designed when less was known about the pragmatics of representative democracy because of less extensive experience and no systematic research and analysis, but also because in some parts it was designed with bad purpose (notably, entrenching chattel slavery.)
Undermining the whole architecture ought to be the goal.
Designing a new architecture should also be a goal, otherwise we will end up in that limbo where the old system has been destroyed but the new system has not yet been built. From what I've read in history books, such transitions are uncomfortable.
If legislators need long terms to provide good government, but they have unfair advantages at re-election, then the solution would be very long terms that are also single term. Perhaps a legislator is elected for 18 years (the amount of time that the top judges serve in Britain), but is only allowed to serve one term. So there are no re-elections. The legislator has one long term to do some good, and then they are gone.
Some people dislike the idea of legislators serving long terms. I've always wondered why, exactly, we are comfortable with judges serving long terms, but not legislators.
Long single terms would remove the lone check of the ballot box. Get in, and then shamelessly profit for an 18 year term. Maybe it would be better because a newcomer might produce a year or two of honest work at the start of their term, but more likely they'd be coming from a lower office where they learned to be thoroughly corrupt.
What's really needed is an end to backwards plurality voting and monopolistic primaries - have one big runoff vote. Make voting for better candidates not be at odds with accepting the safe option. Of course no politician is going to support this, as marketing themselves as the lesser of two evils has become the entirety of their promotion.
Furthermore, get rid of terms and have every single office on the ballot every single year, or better yet every quarter. This would make it much harder to spend overwhelmingly on campaigns (since the campaign would never end). It would also provide a stage for challengers to gain momentum organically rather than this long-iterated process where a challenger becomes viable in one cycle only to be forgotten the next time.
> If you want democratically elected representatives to be able to gain power over the machinery of government, then you should advocate for longer terms, without limits
Sure, but long terms make the democratically elected representatives are less representative of the public will because of lack of immediate accountability.
What would be better is current terms, absence of term limits, and candidate-centered proportional—e.g., by single transferrable vote (STV)—elections in multimember districts (say, up to 5 member districts for the House, two-member for the Senate by putting those from the same state in the same class and electing them together), so that typically there is some choice at the general election within parties (e.g., a party with an incumbent but not all the seats available would usually be incentivized to run at least one more candidate to contest for a potential additional seat) and more viable parties, so that you have both accountability and representatives that are durable in office if they retain popular support.
> If every Senator was elected for 15 years, we would get better government.
If every Senator was elected for 15 years, we get government even more detached from the popular will, both legislatively, executively (because of the Senates veto of top executive appointments), and in judicial selection.
And the reduced accountability would supercharge corruption, too.
"we get government even more detached from the popular will"
Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels present an abundance of evidence that there is no popular will. The public does not understand the issues. The voters do not know what they want. Achen and Bartels also make the interesting argument that when there is more than one issue (more than one dimension) it becomes difficult to build a 51% coalition that also has 51% support on every issue, and where there are, say, 100 issues, it becomes almost mathematically impossible to build a 51% coalition that also holds the popular position on every issue. Put differently, to win elections, politicians must advocate for some deeply unpopular issues. This is the most important thing to understand if we are going to understand "Why elections do not bring about responsive government." (the subtitle of the book).
Of course, it would be possible to solve this particular problem (multi-issue voting lacking a 51% equilibrium) if voters had one vote for every issue. Not that there is any way to know how many issues a voter might regard as important, but giving voters more than one vote, and allowing the election of more than one candidate, does solve some of the mathematical problems that Achen and Bartels raise.
On the other issue, that the public is ignorant of most issues, remains a real concern.
> Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels present an abundance of evidence that there is no popular will.
If one takes that seriously, the solution is to abandon elections and the pretense of democracy entirely.
Arend Lijphart, on the other hand, has shown that there is a public will, people do know what they want, and that democratic systems with greater electoral proportionality deliver it to them better and make them happier with government.
"the solution is to abandon elections and the pretense of democracy entirely"
That does not follow at all. The benefits of democracy have been well-documented -- as well documented as the fact that the voters don't understand the issues and do not know what they want. The evidence on both points is overwhelming. Those facts are not in contradiction to each other, rather, it is clear that the benefits of democracy do not come from the voters. The benefits must come from somewhere else:
Perhaps having career bureaucrats isn't exactly the best thing, either. Many people complain about the lack of term limits for congress but most don't seem to have a problem with the byzantine bureaucracy that practically necessitates having these career bureaucrats, who are often the ones implementing _real_ policy. (I.e. the administrative state).
The advice I give to startup CEOs, regarding their business, is exactly the same advice that I would give to every citizen regarding their government:
"Take, for instance, money. A small team of highly ethical individuals can generally trust one another to safeguard money in an appropriate way. Many small churches and family businesses are run this way, with loose controls over who can deposit or spend. However, as a company grows, the chance you'll hire an unethical individual also grows. At a certain scale it is almost certain that a worker will steal some money, if they have the chance to do so. So a company must impose rules about handling money, and there needs to be a process for paying bills, with someone authorized to write checks and use the company credit cards. This is the beginning of your financial bureaucracy, and the tight limit on who holds the authority to spend is the beginning of hierarchy in this area."
"Is this a bad thing? Again, you'll confuse yourself if you think about this in terms of good or bad. Just focus on your goals. What strengths do you want to build into your organization?"
"Nowadays, there is a widespread idea that bureaucracy makes an organization rigid. But consider the ways that a well-designed bureaucracy for money control can make your organization more flexible. If you decide to keep your money control bureaucracy small then you'll also need to keep your purchasing process simple, perhaps by centralizing all purchasing decisions in the hands of the CEO or CFO. That one individual then becomes a choke point that limits progress – nothing can get done until they find time to pay some bills and buy some necessary materials or services. And there is an obvious limit on how much the company can grow when the authority to pay a bill is so limited. But even when the money handling bureaucracy grows to three or four people, that’s still not enough to oversee complex spending patterns, so your company will still be forced to follow simple and inflexible rules. By contrast, what if you wanted to decentralize the power to make purchases? What if you wanted to empower each team with the ability to make whatever purchases they felt they needed, up to some reasonable limit? That would make your organization much more flexible, but it also makes it more difficult to track the money, and therefore it requires a larger bureaucracy for tracking each dollar. My point is, the larger bureaucracy can actually help enable some kinds of decentralized decision making, and thus improve the agility of the organization. A growing bureaucracy does not automatically equal growing inflexibility, rather, the whole point is to try to maintain flexibility at scale."
Maybe term limits for all government employees. 10 years and you are out. Of course then you would likely end up with tons of former government employees working as contractors to the government. Ban that next? This is a hard problem to solve with rules and laws instead of culture.
If we want good government, then we need civil servants who are willing to work their whole careers in government. If we want good military officers then we need people who will devote their whole life to the military. If we want good park maintenance we should hope for people who are willing to live their whole lives as park rangers. If we want accurate budget projections, we need accountants and economists who are willing to commit their whole lives to understanding the relationship between government policy, taxes, and the results on the budget.
Term limits won't get us there. We need to go in the other direction.
The research on this has built up over the last 120 years and Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels survey most of that, starting with the critics of Progressive Era reforms, and moving up to modern studies of situations where the public has made poor choices because the voters do not understand the issues.
- No federal employee making in excess of 2x (3x?) poverty level may remain on the job for more than 8 years. Possible exemptions: senators + enlisted military personnel. (Need more turnover at the top of officer corps anyway)
- No appointee federal bureaucrat may remain on the job for more than 8 years
- Any appointed bureaucrat or elected official, will have a fixed 79% and 99% tax bracket on any income in excess of the high watermark of the average income in the 5 years preceding their appointment or election.
It also tends to empower lobbyists, not in the sense of elected officials needing money for campaigns, but the officials and their staffs lack knowledge and sophistication on many issues.
Senators used to be representatives of the States, appointed by the States' legislatures. We should return to that.
I'm ambivalent on term limits for House members like Pelosi, though. They are representatives for the people of the States, and as such the people they represent have the right and ability to kick them out, or not. There is also the argument that would you rather have a dog that knows where the bones are buried, or a dog that digs up the whole yard?
That said, members of Congress should have severe restrictions on investing for themselves and their immediate family. They either need to police it themselves, or there needs to be some kind of law that covers it. Not that that is going to happen, as we have the ultimate in foxes guarding the henhouse in our government these days, but it would make for a powerful populist position if anybody had the courage to push it.
> Senators used to be representatives of the States, appointed by the States' legislatures. We should return to that.
That might be tolerable, right after we reduce the powers of the Senate to those of the British House of Lords, which it's original theory of representation is as outdated and inconsistent with representative democracy as, and transfer it's para-executive functions to the House.
Tbf it's a tangibly more meaningful problem with people who are actually Senators, aren't up for reelection every 2 years, and are in a chamber that's disproportionately weighted toward backwaters by design (and not just as a function of the redistricting process).
Pelosi is a Representative, so none of those things are true here.
rather than worrying specifically about term limits, i think the general solution to political corruption is much more democracy, not less. make it very, very expensive for money to corrupt power, and make it hard to stay in power without maintaining fairness and integrity in the political system.
instead of 100 senators, let's have 100 per state [0]. instead of 1 representative per 750,000, let's go back to the original 1 per 30,000, giving us 11,000 representatives. let's have 99 supreme court justices, rather than 9. let's elect all the cabinet positions directly and separately. instead of multi-year terms, let's vote every single year for each representative office, and make election day a mandatory-paid holiday for everyone (to give folks time to research and consider their votes). let's convert many more administrative positions to elected offices. repeal citizen's united, which flooded political campaigns with unlimited amounts of corporate money (giving the wealthy even more disproportionate voice on top of their already disproportionate voice).
it's be messy at times, but we don't get good civics and good governance without the people being given more time and space to think about governance in depth.
[0]: alternatively, we could divide up states into smaller entities, which would be even better for decentralizing power (and limiting corruption), but that's much harder to do.
While I rather like this idea, there's something to the fact that we need a check/balance. What you don't want is to have a mob make bad policy, which I think is what would happen in this case.
This is precisely why individual states can stand up to the federal government -- people in California could make policies that devastate Maryland, for example. Not because they want to, but because they lack context --- even reasonable authority.
that scenario is unlikely in the proposed scenario, since the powers of the federal government is limited insofar as targeting like that is expressly prohibited. indirect targeting (crafting the specifics of a bill to exclude all but the target) is more prevalent amongst a smaller number of insiders working in dark corners of legislation. having many more people involved, and a more democratically-involved populace, provides sunshine on dubious shit like that.
California state offices have term limits, i voted for them, and they are terrible. No one can make a living as a legislator, so we have beginners and they are getting steam rolled by lobbyists. There is now a revolving path of moving from one office to the next to make a living. It is crazy.
And shameless given her rhetoric around the presidential emoluments clause, which is valid, but then apparently for Congress people this concern is dismissed…
Yes but the principal is the same, no? Somebody in a position of power who has strong influence over decisions that happen outside the context of the free market economy should be restricted from participating in those investable opportunities.
Nobody is saying what she is doing is explicitly illegal. But it's abundantly unethical and, imo, a clear abuse of power. Her tone deaf response in this story only adds fuel to the controversy.
Exactly. We have the current example of Senator Wyden who blocked the China Forced Labor bill who received ~$60k in cash from Nike... how is that not quid pro quo?
I think you oversimplify the situation. That's $60k in public campaign donations by executive employees of Nike. Which is based in Oregon, the state that Wyden represents.
Also, $60k isn't that much, considering Wyden usually raises between $4 and $8 million during a reelection year.
My guess is that he would be more swayed by the fact that Nike is one of the largest employers in Oregon.
Like it or hate it, this is the system we have, I don't see any evidence that Wyden is being bought off any more than any other Senator that accepts campaign donations from special interests (which is all of them).
Foreign leaders staying in the hotel chain of the sitting President is pretty blatant corruption. It was even in "the transcript" if anyone remembers back that far. Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Who are you arguing with? No one is defending Trump here. Just because Trump was corrupt doesn't mean that it's OK for his opponents - who've explicitly called out his corruption - to be corrupt.
> Foreign leaders staying in the hotel chain of the sitting President is pretty blatant corruption.
That's about the foreign emoluments clause (which already applies to other public officials including Congress), not the Presidential (domestic) emoluments clause, which is about the President getting money or other material benefit other than those legally due to his office from the federal or state government (which was also an issue with Trump's DC hotel, for many reasons, just not “foreign leaders staying there”.)
Constitution can be amended but the Congress would have to amend it against their own private interest so of course it will not happen (but should)... the point you're making is moot though
Well the Constitution can be amended without Congress via a Constitutional Convention. My point wasn't moot though, it was a direct response to PC which was asking why someone's rhetoric around a literal clause of the Constitution defining the most powerful role in government. A clause that isn't defined for Representatives, whom are not singular in their power, and collectively are given the power to set their own rules. Not to say that a debate cannot be had, but PC was trying to make it seem that there was hypocrisy afoot.
I'm not sure I've heard that argued, and would generally agree that a President can own interest in foreign companies. However in an effort to avoid clear conflicts of interest or an actual emolument from occurring, it would be wise of them to divest of them. Otherwise a foreign state can use it against them in some way, either to attempt to extort, or to visibly promote it to create the air of conflict. And then the President would be unable to do anything without the taint.
True. But I meant it more in the context of the discussion. Her implication is that she wishes to continue trading stocks instead of parking her money someplace safe while in office. Why? What is the point? Does she not have enough? Is it sport? I'm not saying people should not get wealthy, but she could park it and easily still get $10M a year.
Feinstein is worth even more, her husband is a billionaire based off Chinese trade deals. People need to realize politicians on both sides of the aisle sold them out to get rich
Her husband is a professional investor who somehow manages to buy very deep options on troubled corporations right before the legislative branch hands them a bunch of money, sending their stock price soaring.
California can't be bothered not to elect this evil person that is the absolute epitome of corruption.
> California can't be bothered not to elect this evil person
Except in the tiniest (by population) states, states at large do not elect members to the House, despite the fact that they are frequently identified by party and state.
California is the maximum example of the error of this kind of description.
Is there evidence of this? Anytime I have seen the details, in context, of Pelosi trades, they seem very unconvincing.
When someone does a lot of trading, it is easy to cherry pick the successful trades or apparently conflicted trades while ignoring the whole picture, and scope of the portfolio.
There was a twitter account that was called "Nancy Pelosi's Stock Tracker" but since Jack left, the new CEO seems to have shut the account down. I have no idea why it was shutdown though.
From what I've seen in headlines he buys a lot of big tech call options dated a year out or more. Since big tech has done well over the past decade, he probably has beat S&P by buying calls. As long as big tech stocks go up 10% a yr, he'll do well with that strategy.
I think the public should be given notice immediately when Congress members purchase or sell shares/options. I think they should also have to hold on to shares/options for a certain length of time. I think this could solve most problems.
Is this the right question? Insider trading is incredibly hard to prove as it is. But we know that Pelosi is privy to insider information. She's an 82 year old centimillionaire, does she really need to be day-trading options?
Not to mention it's commonsensical at this point -- we can let the courts decide, but there is enough reason to suspect something dubious is afoot, given her lack of integrity as a person from moral and ethical standpoints.
I don't think that would be possible to deduce from public filings. I would imagine that someone has estimated it based on net worth growth, but of course, that would assume that all of their investments are in stock only. They own an investment company as well as lots of real estate. More than likely, their growth in net worth has primarily been through appreciation and income from the business.
> As of December 22nd stimulus was just approved on that day. On December 22'nd, Pelosi’s Husband purchased deep ITM TSLA and AAPL calls. After Market close on December 22'nd, she voiced support for $2000 of stimulus after Donald Trump tweets the need for additional stimulus. Those same companies rally 5%, giving an instant +30 return, on Dec 23rd.
As much as I despise Trump I think see very well why he became president back when he did and also why Joe Biden barely won despite the massive support he got from almost every tech and media company.
"elect". There's rampant election fraud. Elections are total fraud all over the US, Trump's election gave so much evidence, but so called "liberals" just ignore it. Even tho it hurts them just as well and they get corrupt candidates from it. Bernie was also cheated out. The magnitude of fraud shown at 2020 presidential election was huge, you can easily control congress with a fraction of that fraud, and that was probably happening for years. Congress approval rating tells you all you need to know about how functioning are your elections.
Oh come on. Have you seen the people who have primaried her? While their politics may or may not be better, they have been problematic personal and professional lives.
Non-partisan primaries in the inner Bay Area are usually Dem vs. Dem. For all intents and purposes they are effectively partisan (ignoring the bad blood between “moderate” Dems and self-styled “progressives”), with Republicans relegated as essentially a distant third party.
> Non-partisan primaries in the inner Bay Area are usually Dem vs. Dem.
No, they aren't, they universally include numerous parties and independents, including Republicans, as well as Democrats.
They general election after the top-two nonpartisan primary is sometimes Dem v. Dem, though that’s only happened in exactly one (2020) of Pelosi’s five elections since the top-two nonpartisan primary was adopted, so even if you meant the general rather than the primary, “usually” is far misplaced.
The last primary we had for an empty seat was something like 4 Dems, 1 Republican and some other third party. The Republican didn’t really even show up to various debates and round tables.
> The last primary we had for an empty seat was something like 4 Dems, 1 Republican and some other third party
I’m not sure which seat and which election you are talking about, but that would be consistent with the Republican strategy of trying to discourage more candidates from running, because that way vote splitting worms in their favor, maximizing their chance of making it into the top 2 and maximizing their perceived strength going into the general. Party leaders have been fairly open about their strategy of dealing with the top-two primary system.
> The Republican didn’t really even show up to various debates and round tables.
That's also a pretty common Republican strategy where there would be more than two candidates on the stage in California, on the theory (which has some support) that the hits coming out of such a forum will be on the candidates involved.
This dead reply could not be more sound, and plausible. It was downvoted due to a dogpile of political disagreements, sadly. I am beyond excited to say "we told you so" when the populace is ready to acknowledge it, and gets beyond its hatred founded on veritable lies about a single man.
While we're talking about Pelosi, it was rather funny to see how she has reacted to the Mark Meadows texts recently, which single-handedly disprove the Left's January 6 claims of Trump's involvement, a baseless conspiracy theory from start to finish.
I truly can't wait until we no longer tolerate fabricated political scandals ruining the fabric of society by deceiving people to act their ugliest towards otherwise average people.
Raw evidence or blind willful ignorance, take your pick — from a centrist's perspective:
Then why else did the committee drop that evidence like a hot potato once they found out it complicated their case?
We're not seeing their corporate media buddies belabor trivial information or twisting it to manipulate people into thinking it serves as evidence against Trump.
In fact, in the video I linked, it shows a clip from CNN of all places supporting my point because they can't even twist it.
Willful ignorance is a choice, it's just nice when folks are more honest about it.
> Then why else did the committee drop that evidence
On what basis do you claim they did?
I mean, sure, it might look like they had if they didn't question Meadows about it when he showed up to testify after they got it...but he didn't, which is why he’s facing a contempt referral. Short of that, other than it's absence from any final report, I’m not sure what concrete sign would exist that they had “dropped” it at all.
> We're not seeing their corporate media buddies belabor trivial information or twisting it to manipulate people into thinking it serves as evidence against Trump.
While I agree with the exact wording here, as what is being belabored is not trivial and the analysis of how it is evidence against Trump and his inner circle is not twisted, the media that's not full-time right-wing propaganda is indeed pointing to them as a “smoking gun”, so, if “major media pundits aren't claiming that they are evidence against Trump” is the basis of your claim that the committee is dropping the texts, the premise is as faulty as the logic (a few examples of thousands):
About the best you can say for the texts is that they are sometimes being treated as less of a smoking gun than the PowerPoint presentation on the strategy for the coup turned over by Meadows.
One of the more toxic ideas floating around our culture is this idea of "net worth" as a scoreboard.
This woman is 82 years old and a leader of a nominally left-wing party.
So given the choice between:
1. taking a principled stand against the use of political access for financial gain, and dying in a few years with a NW of $100m
2. defending insider trading, and dying in a few years with a NW for $150m
It's worth asking what cultural programming would make someone even consider #2. It's not the usual reasons people want more money. There is no hedonic utility, no extra financial independence, no added social status that comes with #2.
I have no problem with accumulating wealth as a means to an end. But if you're willing to compromise your legacy to run that score up a little higher, you're an npc & you've lost the plot.
* We've had 3X murders more than "covid deaths" last year.
* We have people dying on the street - you have to literally walk over them.
* We have human shit everywhere.
* The mayor's ex-boyfriend was arrested by the FBI for stealing money from the "clean streets program".
* They banned natural gas and it is ~40 F right now.
* She repeatedly gets away without wearing a mask (in the hair salon, at the Getty wedding, etc.) while us plebes get violently assaulted for not having our mask on 'properly' in the fucking grocery store.
* The school board refers to Asian Americans as "house niggers" and won't leave until people bribe her with a package of tens of millions of dollars.
* They tried to rename the schools from names like Washington and Lincoln. Why? I don't know Lincoln, a republican, wrote this document called the emancipation proclamation - apparently freeing a bunch of slaves or something.
* You can't enter a restaurant or most any business inside the city without showing your papers - even if you are tripled/quadruple vaxd and you are wearing a mask.
* Oh yeh, I forgot, you can legally rape a 14 year old boy but not a 14 year old girl.
Man, this fucking list is endless. I hope San Francisco is the first city the Chinese bomb with their nuclear tipped hyper-sonics.
Did you know you can legally rape a 14 year old boy in San Fran Shithole?
Did you know that the school board calls asian americans "house niggers" ?
Did you know that Pelosi repeatedly gets away without wearing a mask inside even though all of us will get yelled at if we don't have the mask above the nose in the grocery store, present our vax pass and be tripled or quad vaxd?
Did you know that London Breed's (also who repeatedly violates the city and now state mask mandate) boyfriend was arrested by the FBI for stealing money from the SF Clean Streets Program?
I was responding to "Regulation always degenerates into a weapon of the corrupt."
That's an easy target to sass, because it's such an easy target. Did I reply to wrong comment or something? Maybe it's because I'm on mobile. Apologies if I replied to the wrong person.
By definition, it's impossible to make all snake oil illegal. Think about all the crypto scams. They count. Even if crypto were outlawed, people will always come up with new "snake oil."
"don't appreciate this kind of cheap pedantry. Does it feel good"
I think this is extremely unfair, as in your own pedantry seems fine, where you are correct only for very spesific and us-centric definition of 'force' and 'snakeoil'.
You free market people can't even agree if patents and copyright are part of free market. I had one of you tell me that endentured servitude was part of freedom of contract.
You seem to think we should leave snake oil salesmen alone, so it seems free market includes freedom to defraud the customer. Does it also include freedom to defraud the company?
This 'free market' is a spherical cow and would collapse into anarchy from pissed off people shooting each-other, it's no more viable than communism is.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Assuming good faith keeps discussion here at a high level. Let's not descend to strawmen. If you disagree with javert but do not wish to engage the argument, you do not need to respond.
The problem is that an unregulated free-market economy guarantees monopolies to form, which ironically allows them to use tactics that prevent fair competition. This is why mixed-economies are most efficient, as they take advantage of capitalism while preventing some of the edge cases where capitalism falls apart.
You really hit the nail on the head here. Members of Congress (and their staff) should either simply be held to the already existing rules on insider trading. They should not be able to act upon material non public information. They should be subject to trading windows and restrictions. They should not be able to vote on any legislation affecting held securities. Don't want to be subject to the rules? Set up a blind trust like the rest of us would have to.
If Congress is going to be held to a different standard than the rest of us, it should be a higher standard, not a more lax one.
> Members of Congress (and their staff) should either simply be held to the already existing rules on insider trading. They should not be able to act upon material non public information.
Is the law actually enforced though? It seems like every other month we see evidence of congress members selling off a ton of stock mere days before some critical piece of information goes public that makes the stock value drop.
With 538 members of our government bodies making trades at "random", with typical trading intervals, it doesn't seem so outrageous that a few times a year there will be a trade that looks to be made on insider information.
I'm not saying it never happens, but I think it's difficult to separate "insider trading" from "getting lucky" when you're talking about 538 generally well-off, active traders.
It's like when a CEO offloads stock before it drops and everyone loses their minds. But if you dig in to the story, the CEO is just selling stock on a regular schedule.
The bill [1] makes it harder to access records for e.g. Congressional staffers [2]. But insider trading restrictions for everyone remain. And the disclosure requirements for members of Congress are virtually untouched.
>Holman showed me how it works. You have to enter your name and address into a computer, and then you can search. But you have to know the name of the person you are searching for. If he or she has filed a financial disclosure form, it will come up as a PDF, which you can print at a cost of 10 cents a page.
>"The database itself is almost meaningless," says Holman. He says the only option for those who want to get a comprehensive look at what some 2,900 staffers have filed is to review the cases one by one. "And that's just too big a job for anybody to do."
>The STOCK Act was supposed to make this task significantly easier. Records for members of Congress, the executive branch and their staffs were supposed to be posted online in a searchable, sortable and downloadable format.
>If you wanted to see who traded health care stock just before a committee acted on a health care bill, it would be easy. No trips to the basement required.
Taking the database offline due to identity theft concerns is understandable.
What isn't defensible is making it impossible to query the records in a useful way even onsite. SQL was 43 years old in 2013. It's perhaps unobvious to a nontechnical person, but the average reader of Hacker News should immediately recognize that it isn't normal to be unable to search a database of textual records, whose total size is probably less than 10 TB.
> They should not be able to act upon material non public information.
That's not what insider trading is, though. Insiders are, well, inside.
If you come across non-public information as an outsider, you are of course free to trade on it. Congresspeople are, theoretically, at odds with companies (as they impose regulation restraining those companies) and it's hard to view them as having a duty of any kind to the company itself.
A market that allows insiders to profit from still-hidden information, inevitably at the expense of non-insiders, is not truly free. And legislators privy to non-public information from hearings are definitely insiders in any rational sense. The fact that they're not so in a legal sense is only a reflection of the fact that they write the laws and sometimes do so for their own benefit. As the saying goes...
There are two groups of people who laugh at the law: those who break it, and those who make it.
How do you prevent this anyway? If you want to make money from insider info you can trade it (on a truly free black market), if you want to minimize the risk of being caught.
Is trading an index fund that much better, when you are effectively The Government and can make decisions, let alone know about them in advance, that will affect entire markets?
There's a good example right in front of our eyes right now. In order for inflation to get back to normal, the index has to drop around 20%. A drop would be pretty much inevitable as the liquidity would have to be pulled out. Powell has all his reported holdings in the index. People who influence his decisions are likely also very much invested in the index. Is anybody gonna do the right thing?
In our free market economy execs can’t trade on inside information or they would go to jail. It’s legal for congress to trade in inside information. She’s a sleazebag for blowing this off.
I think what a lot of people miss is that a well regulated market is a free market.
A market that is unregulated ends up with monopolies and huge power dynamics as the old guard is able to pool capital through momentum and compounding forces. Good regulation reduces the power imbalance so David has the possibility to defeat Goliath and they can fight on even ground.
I don't think anybody believes that we still have a free market.
IMO, based on the current unfree market, politicians should not be allowed to trade stocks and it should be illegal for any large corporation to fire employees for any reason (except maybe by majority vote).
> But when asked whether lawmakers and their spouses should be prohibited from trading stock while in Congress, Pelosi said, “No,” adding that “this is a free market.”
I get iffier on this when you regulate family members. Children? Siblings? Parents? You'd be forcing a good number of Congressional spouses to retire if you implemented this without a gradual implementation.
I'd like to see lawmakers subject to similar restrictions as other insiders; having to openly plan their stock sales/purchases at least several months out. If you want a more actively managed portfolio than that, hire a financial firm to run a blind trust for you.
For spouses I don't see a problem. In the US spouses cannot be forced to testify against one another in court. So (also) barring a spouse from benefitting from insider trading seems a fair trade-off.
>"You'd be forcing a good number of Congressional spouses to retire if you implemented this without a gradual implementation."
Call me jaded, but boo-hoo, so be it. The power and privileges that come with being so close to someone in power surely make up for the loss of being able to trade stocks.
If you’re not in house leadership, salaries are around $174,000. Depending on where someone is in their life (children in college, mortgage, etc) this may not be enough to be a single income earner in a family.
Not saying that family members should have unfettered abilities to trade, but having to use something like a trading plan or announcing trades prior or even just (gasp) enforcing insider trading laws against them, would be terrific.
Members of Congress tend to wind up having to run two households, though, and I'm sure there's a variety of other sorts of expenses that are fairly unusual. Salaries haven't gone up in over a decade, either.
Limiting Congress to people who can independently afford the income/expense hit might not be optimal.
> salaries havent gone up because they've opted to decline the increase for themselves
Well, sure; why would the wealthy incumbents want to make it easier for new, not-independently-wealthy candidates to break in? You probably limit the AOC-style folks a bit by not adjusting for inflation.
> they can easily pass a bill to fund lodgings for congress critters in DC if they wanted
The whole idea of marriage is that their interests are united. A spouse is just one half of a two-shareholder corporation, so whatever covenants and restrictions there are shouldn't sit upon just one half but the whole.
That said, I do think it would be entirely legitimate to prohibit government service outside of the enlisted (non-officer) military ranks for direct relations of politicians during and some time after their term in office, it would just take a constitutional amendment and some very carefully thought out details.
The crime is insider trading. They have information the rest of the market does not. This is already against the law. If we really care about the law we need to enforce it even when the rich and powerful break it.
"Insider trading is about theft, not fairness". Many sophisticated traders have proprietary information on their positions. The key is the conflict of interest
I disagree. It is about fairness to some degree. Insider trading undermines the integrity of market. Which is why Pelosi's statement here is so absurd.
Not my area of the law, but I don’t think he’s right.
I think the general consensus is essentially “fairness” for utilitarian reasons. Markets are important, and insider trading discourages investment because it creates an impression of unfairness and increases uncertainty.
> Not my area of the law, but I don’t think he’s right.
As far as I know that's how the law is structured. A second source that say the same thing:
>KESTENBAUM: And she says while everybody gets upset at insider trading because it gives someone an unfair advantage, that is not the legal reason why it gets you into trouble. The argument used these days in court for why it's illegal is that insider trading amounts to stealing information from a company. It's like theft. And so for that reason, proving that someone traded on insider information - that is not enough to convict them. If, say, a financial document from some company blows out the window, and you happen to find it sitting there on the sidewalk, Sarah says it's not insider trading for you to use that to make money in the stock market because you didn't steal it.
As for your "fairness" hypothesis, it really doesn't hold. Is it "fair" that hedge funds can afford to spend millions on alternative data sources (eg. flying helicopters with thermal cameras over oil fields, to see how much oil is being stored) to get a edge over traders who can't? Probably not. Is it banned? No. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2013-12-19/helico...
Okay, but that's not how laws work. You can't go to the judge and say, "your honor, this person violated the SEC's mission statement and is therefore a criminal!". The mission statement might be correlated with what the law says (it might also not be, see: "to serve and protect"), but the ultimate source of truth is statues/precedence. Given that your claims contradicts what two well credentials individuals[1] claim, it seems prudent to require more evidence than just "that's SEC's mission statement". A link to the exact section of the relevant statue, or a relevant appellate court decision would do.
[1] matt levine was "a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, and a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit", and the person interviewed for the NPR story was "a defense attorney" and "now a fellow at Yale Law School".
Which part are you doubting? That Pelosi has access to material nonpublic information? Or that she's making money on trades after she attains that knowledge?
The latter is public record. She and her husband have drastically outperformed the market for years. I think the former is undeniable given her job. Just a comment about an industry she likes or doesn't like can impact share prices.
Again, you are making an incredible claim (Pelosi has made money illegally) without providing any evidence. I understand that this rhetoric is normal on some low-quality websites that you may frequent, but there's generally a higher standard of discourse here.
For evidence that she has inside information, I'd encourage you to read the wiki article for Speaker of The House, especially the sections that go over their legislative and committee-steering powers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speaker_of_the_United_States_H...
There's no smoking gun audio recording where Nancy Pelosi specifically says "Hey Paul, I'm gonna launch an investigation against Facebook and accuse them of being a monopoly tomorrow, so sell your shares now!"
I could lose my job for insider trading even without that direct proof of causality, just trading stock with material insider info leads to a presumption of wrongdoing. Since Pelosi nominally works for us, maybe she (and the rest of Congress) should be held to the same standard?
I don't think the claim is particularly incredible like you claim: around 50 members of Congress have been punished for violating the STOCK Act with fines often as high as $200.
This is quite different from insider trading in the private sector. In addition to having information that is not public, legislators also have the power to influence the value of their investments by passing legislation favorable to companies they are invested in or harmful to their competition. Does anyone think lawmakers can be objective when they may have millions of dollars at stake?
You'd have to be fairly delusional not to expect these sorts of connections to arise. Arnold Schwarzenegger married into the Kennedy family; their dating pool is largely other highly-connected political folks.
Same reason celebrities largely date other celebrities.
This issue a symptom of the underlying problem --- the activist US government influences outcomes in every market -- indeed the feds pick the winners and losers in many markets through spending, tax benefits, and regulations. The true reform is to limit the size and scope of the government and return it to being a neutral referee of the private sector.
>"The true reform is to limit the size and scope of the government and return it to being a neutral referee of the private sector."
In principle yes, but this really does seem like an impossibly idealistic goal. We would practically have to repeal the last 150 years of American government, probably more, to get back to semblance of this ideal. It would also require a fundamental cultural shift in how the citizenry views the role of government. From my perspective the younger generations yearn for more government intervention, not less. You would have to undo that mindset through multiple decades of influence.
I agree. The only way I see such reform happening in less than a generation is an Article 5 convention. A convention can strip the government of all unconstitutional power it has acquired and make amendments to attempt to prevent the same power creep that has occurred over the last 150 years.
One thing I think our Constitution needs is an explicitly protected right of nullification. That adds an additional check on passed laws for when multiple branches of government are aligned with the same faction.
We are currently seeing some states practice their implicit right of nullification and it is beautiful.
Yes, we're an free-market economy, or at least an imperfect approximation of that.
No, that doesn't mean insider trading is ok. And since lawmakers are privy to information that can materially move stocks, and is not always generally known to the public, they should definitely qualify as insiders.
Perhaps there should be others (GOP Sen Richard Burr particularly comes to mind after last year's incident), but at this point it seems to me she should be the first to go. She's the speaker of the house. With greater power comes greater responsibility, to set a good example in this case, rather than to reinforce bad behavior. Changes comes from the top, and the buck stops there.
Shouldn't be that hard to solve, IMO. Congress members should be required to rebalance their portfolio into index funds for the duration of their term. Family members should be subject to insider trading regulation, and the congress member considered an insider.
This is a solved problem. Employees of RIAs have the same trading restrictions. The SEC's adopting release[1] of the RIA Code of Ethics requirements gives a pretty good overview of how it works in the "Personal Securities Trading" section. Each RIA firm has their own policy implementing the rule but here's an example of how family is typically defined from a random firm's policy I found via DDG:
> “Immediate Family” generally means any relative by blood or marriage living in the individual’s household, any domestic partner or other minor child residing in his or her household and, whether or not living in the individual’s household, any other relative with respect to whose investments the individual has influence or control.
I was bound by this when working for a Big 4 professional services firm — it was ludicrous that I had far more restrictions placed upon myself than congress did for just being an employee of a firm that did audit and attest work (which was not work I participated in). At a bare minimum we should make them follow the rules that anyone else with access to manipulate financial markets has to follow.
That would still favor the companies in index funds (i.e. large ones who could go through an IPO) as opposed to small companies or self-employed people.
My feeling is that they should be able to bring any of their previous positions or investment into their terms, but not exit or otherwise change them except into index funds.
So let's say that prior to being elected someone's heavy into telecoms for some reason. Keep the positions! Keep them as long as you want. If you want to sell, go ahead. If you want to buy back in? Sure, but index funds only.
There's still some room for abuse there but it vastly reduces the opportunity for abuse.
You’ve given us a proposal, but how do you implement it? Surely a proposal doesn’t solve anything, you have to implement it to actually solve something. So how do you implement your proposal?
Not so easy… first you need a bill to pass. It has to be put to a vote by Nancy Pelosi, who said she won’t support your solution. So you need to get rid of her: either she retires or loses reelection (unlikely) or you get a Republican speaker.
Would a Republican speaker put your bill to a vote? Certainly not after Nancy Pelosi cited “free market capitalism” as a reason for resisting restrictions. The Republican speaker can’t be portrayed as being to the left of Pelosi, who has been interchangeably labeled a “liberal communist socialist democrat leftist”.
And then there is the vote itself. Even if you get it to a vote, you are asking a group of people to take away a benefit to themselves. They are literally voting on whether to make themselves poorer. Is that going to be an easy vote to whip? Not likely.
And then if it does pass, then you have enforcement issues. There was just an issue of Congressman Collins getting convicted of insider trading for giving tips to his son. He was caught on tape. He pleaded guilty. 2 years he was sentenced. He should be serving his sentence right now. Instead he is a free man, the beneficiary of a Presidential Pardon for his crimes.
So even if you pass you pass the hurdle of the speaker; even if you pass the hurdle of the vote; even if you enforce the law on the books through the criminal justice system with courts, judges, evidence, and a sentence; EVEN THEN the powers that be will find a way to remain unconstrained by your solution. “Laws are for thee, not for me.”
So yea, we can throw out “easy solutions” all day that are really just proposals that will do nothing to solve this problem. Because this is a problem of the powerful self-dealing, and you don’t solve that through the system they use to deal themselves.
The more general problem is: “how do you pass a law that benefits society but is a detriment to its elected representatives?” It’s a meta question too, because whatever mechanisms we come up with would be, by extension, beneficial to society and detrimental to politicians.
I work for a publicly traded company. I am only allowed to purchase stock in the company during certain windows, and IIRC, only in certain amounts. I can't trade or play with options related to the stock at any other time.
When I worked for a bank (in IT, but still) there was plenty of training on not making trades on non-public knowledge.
---
On one hand, I understand how a blanket ban on stock trading would seem harsh, but it seems there is no alternative given the feckless enforcement of existing insider trading regs in Congress.
They should all be offered a series of mutual fund options with different growth/risk targets, kind of like 401k packages, and that be that.
Pelosi saying "it's a free market" is a non sequitur. It's angering and embarrassing that she is so incompetent or brazenly dismissive of real concerns.
I really hope that we get just enough "clean" politicians in the near future to drive popular will towards more transparency and regulation on the topic.
> I work for a publicly traded company. I am only allowed to purchase stock in the company during certain windows, and IIRC, only in certain amounts. I can't trade or play with options related to the stock at any other time.
I assume you are an officer at the company in question? I've never heard of a general restriction on employees buying stock in their own publicly traded company, aside from specific employees in certain positions.
Interesting, thanks. TIL. I have never run into such a policy. But I've never worked for Google or FB, either. Interviewing with The Goog next week, however, so there's a 0.01% chance that could change...
No, the company I work for has two classes of employee based on the expected level of "insider" knowledge, think engineering vs. finance and corporate.
All employees are restricted by trading windows. I'm not sure if this is explicitly required by law, or a condition of employment in order to not get anyone in trouble - I don't know how my company would know if I traded on my own, so I assume it's law.
There is no /freedom/ in our markets. There are plenty of items that are unavailable. There are plenty of restrictions on trade. There are massive tariffs on trade. There are limits on the amount of monies spent or earned.
The concept of a free-market scares the politicians in America, and those politicians do everything in their power to prevent exactly that; a free-market.
Russia in the 90-ies: everything was up to sale, including human lives, government itself (all three branches), all kinds of property imaginable, and enforcement or non-enforcement of contracts. They're commonly named as "holy nineties" amongst the wealthy people who built their wealth (and managed to survive) during those years: no excessive bureaucracy, all problems could be solved (for the right price) with a single phone call to the right people. Paragon of freedom and efficiency!
Of course, the rest of the population who also managed to survive the nineties remember them in much, much less rosy terms... and there were quite some number of those who did not survive, but eh, why care about those losers? As the first Minister of Economy and Finances of Russia himself said, "we're living during the tectonic changes and reforms, and the death of those who were incapable to adapt to the market is an inevitable part of the process".
By those criteria, no free market exists in any significant capacity, and you get into the sort of "Communism would work if people cooperated!" silliness territory.
> and you get into the sort of "Communism would work if people cooperated!" silliness territory.
What are you on about?
Lets run a quick thought test:
Are you for or against people selling:
- bio-weapons to kids on the street?
- heroin?
What about sending money to North Korea?
What about... you get the point
Free-Market means no restriction on market, the magical self-regulation will restrict undesired transactions somehow.
What modern economies have are:
Open, fair markets, overseen by governments to ensure its fair and open. They are not somehow communist because they regulate and ensure baby milk is free of heavy metals and paint has no lead in it.
The point is that neither perfect communism nor perfect free market setups are possible. Everything is always going to fall somewhere in the middle of things; you'll find some countries with less regulation in some areas, more in others.
As such, statements like "The concept of a free-market scares the politicians in America" as if it were achievable in the strict context the poster requires ("There is no /freedom/ in our markets") are a bit silly. Why would they be scared of something that literally can't exist?
Proponents of communism similarly like to use the "well that wasn't real communism" to evade critiques of the real-world implementations of it.
That's just a way to twist the issue into a political dig against laissez-faire people. It's not a real defense because she's too powerful to need a defense.
I definitely don't like the idea of insider trading by lawmakers, for all of the reasons that are obvious to everybody. On the other hand, if they put their money in a blind trust, the conflict is still there. My reasoning is that the blind trust will still want to put their money in the "best" investment, and the lawmakers can influence which investment is "best" through policy and legislation.
The easiest example that I see is the continued long term growth of the stock and the real estate markets. (Disclosure, I'm invested in those markets too). It's pretty easy to imagine passing stock- and real estate-friendly legislation, which is great for me, but not necessarily great for society as a whole, and not necessarily done by any kind of majority consent.
But at least in the case of a blind trust, while you can't eliminate conflict of interest altogether, at least it makes the conflict more transparent.
Better than nothing. It would stop corruption by specific companies and industry lobbyists. Election finance reform is needed, too. Representatives should represent people no matter how much or how little money those people have. No system is going to be perfect but there are some obvious departures from the ideal that can be reduced.
This would be less of a severe issue if congress-critter was merely something you did for one or two terms, rather than a permanent career.
The Roman cursus honorum had many flaws, but enforcing an up-or-out mentality that discouraged officials lurking in the same position for forty years was not one of them.
You win your first election as Quaestor, then you are a senator for life (provided you maintain the minimum property qualification of 2 million sesterces). But to win higher magistracies, there are fewer offices and the competition is more intense. Not exactly up-or-out, but I see what you mean. Especially in an honor-based society, no one wanted to be the perpetually junior senator.
But yes, you would not find the same person monopolizing a magistracy for 40 years.
It's like Venezuela where the connected-to-the-government people could exchange their bolivars for dollars at a much more favorable rate than everyone else.
I give most US politicians the benefit of the doubt. They are usually loathed, but I believe do want to make things better as opposed to enrich themselves.
So they can start acting like it. Your job is bigger than yourself now. You are the highest of public servant. The cost of money-motivated grifters and immense distrust from the public is far greater than the cost of losing a few people who would be good politicians but need to live lavishly.
Financial transparency above and beyond regular citizens, middle income, middle housing. That's a fair shake. How can you stay in touch with the average citizen when you have three lavish estates?
> The purchases could have been done by Pelosi or her husband Paul, who runs a venture capital firm.
I mean, my kids have beaten the stock market over the last two years, largely for the same reason; I put some of their allowance into Tesla shares with them.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 521 ms ] threadEspecially the businesses they own shares of...
That's not the normal insider trading rule. The normal insider trading rule is that you cannot trade on inside information at all.
> so that the information that senators and congressman are acting on is quickly disseminated.
The way to do that is to disseminate the information before making any trades, so everyone has an opportunity to decide whether they want to trade on it.
Yes, and just for the sake of clarity, "inside" also means non-public. Once it is announced, it is no longer insider info and you can trade on it.
No matter how quickly this information gets out, they still have first mover advantage. There is simply no way to compete with that.
Anyway, just imagine if the thin line of law that is currently barely stopping rich at the moment, just stopped applying all of the sudden...
Count to ten... pooof...
And we all hail our beloved King Bezos the first, and the return of feudalism.
Insider trading, however, is anti-free market, because you're relying on an information disparity to gain an advantage.
Free market is like the shroudinger's cat, everyone has a different idea of where it is. In the other thread people were claiming that having a central bank is anti-free-market, but it's unclear how interest rate should be set and money supply be created and regulated.
In fact, it's required for any market to exist in the first place. Without regulation the concept of ownership goes out the window. "Free markets" would look like anarchy... and exactly as you lay out in the river analogy it would be utter chaos with everyone acting in their best interest like "damn the consequences!" - it's human nature.
Sorry if I'm coming off as abrupt here - I'm aggressively agreeing and building on your point... IMO the markets require regulation when all is said and done. People who point to a "free market" often do so to shield themselves from the same regulations/rules that are designed to keep the markets afloat just like Pelosi has done here. It's gotten to the point that the words "free market" are almost always a sign of a bad faith argument.
Nah - IMO you made a super strong point which is why I wanted to respond with my thoughts. I was just trying to explain why I was being pedantic pulling some of the words apart with my "sorry for abrupt/aggressively agreeing" comment =)
Cheers!
Insider trading is when you steal the information from someone else (often your employer) to make those trades - misappropriating value for yourself that does not belong to you.
This is not a defense, it's a dismissal.
If they are using insider information so effectively, anyone is free to copy their moves, no?
EDIT: That they only report 45 days after the fact is indeed a significant difference from company insiders and severely limits how well someone could profit by following along.
I just don't think Congress has much in the way of insider information most of the time. Antitrust litigation would be one example where they do, but what else? Company insiders by contrast almost by definition have insider information.
If they're long the market and then boosting the market... I mean, isn't that what we want? You'd have to go further than a blind trust even and ban owning equities at all.
If I want to buy/sell Boeing stock and I'm a Senator, I should have to publicly file that intention three months in advance, and not be able to undo it. Those filings should immediately be public in a data feed.
I'd expect to see a "Congressional stock purchases index fund" arise, and it'd be fascinating to see how it performed.
Stuff like https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/11/politics/rand-paul-wife-stock... - "oops, forgot to disclose my stock moves for over a year!" - should be punishable by loss of trading ability and confiscation of the assets (not just profits) involved.
The "Congressional stock purchases index fund" would underperform though https://www.investopedia.com/tiktokers-track-lawmakers-perso...
> Academic research revealed that senators' stock purchases underperformed the benchmark during six-month intervals by 17 basis points between 2012 and March 2020
Only follow the trades of those in leadership, give special attention to transactions involving defense contractors by members of the Committee on Armed Services, etc.
I don't doubt that Congress has its share of confident morons to skew the numbers downwards, but you might be able to identify people who somehow manage to make better moves.
"Day of" should be the rule. Basically, have them trade in the public eye. You could subscribe to congressional stock feeds to see what they're personally buying and selling as it happens.
Letting them do "day of" doesn't really help; if you know Boeing's gonna get the contract at 3:00pm you could just do the buy at 2:59pm. No one has time to react.
When Boeing thinks about inking a contract, they crow about it. By the time the contract is signed, any changes in the stock are reflected.
"Three months without the ability to cancel" is a very naive solution and creates a whole new host of problems while not really solving much.
Yeah... 45 days after the trade (per https://www.investopedia.com/tiktokers-track-lawmakers-perso...). Not to mention that both dominant parties don't take their responsibilities seriously (https://www.businessinsider.com/congress-staff-violated-stoc...), and that information can be filed on paper so sleuths have a much harder time digging through the data to spot suspicious trades (https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2013/04/action-alert-stock-...).
An effective law would require all elected representatives to identify themselves and their close relatives (i.e. parents, siblings and children) as such to their banks and brokers, with the banks and brokers having to maintain an instant feed exposing all trades executed on the accounts of these people.
A while back there was some noise around potential favorable treatment she gave Visa around the time of their IPO. [1] Congresspeople really should be forced to stop all trading activity while serving in office, aside from maybe putting things in index funds. And have term limits.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-details-on-visas-attempt-to...
Society is worse off for it, probably, sure. But if our society doesn’t care about our society, why should I? Is that shameful? I used to think so but I’m not really that convinced anymore.
> Society is worse off for it, probably, sure.
You answered your own question. You are directly and knowingly contributing to the worsening of society and you should feel ashamed for it. If anything you should feel shame for your lack of self awareness here
But why? Telling someone they should be "ashamed of [their] own lack of self-awareness" sounds like you don't know how to answer the question, so you just hurl insults instead.
History has shown over and over and over that relying on people to be benevolent when they have outsized power is foolish. That they almost never have this "shame" you think everyone should have. I find this to be far more foolish: consolidating power into someone's hands with the assumption that they will rely on shame or pride to guide them towards using the power for good. We should all acknowledge humans are tribalist and self-interested, and limit the amount of power they can have to exploit. The way I see it, if you give them the power and they "misuse" it, that's as much your fault as theirs.
Additionally - we're talking about a pool of 435 people here - not thousands or millions. Individual house reps standing up and personally pledging to trade individual stocks does happen and usually gets accolades in the news. This is a case where the scale is so small that you acting benevolently against society has the power to sway society to act better.
So I think this particular scenario is a lot different than being a good person who properly separates their recycling (if that's a thing where you are) among the millions who can't be assed and a system that has no real expectation that you will.
Maybe what you think of as morality is actually just a set of dictum from powerful people that helps them enrich themselves at the expense of you. There's absolutely no cosmic or objective moral basis for our insider trading laws one way or the other. It just so happens that they conveniently enrich the people who make the laws at the expense of everyone else. Again, what moral framework does this fit into? People acting selfishly, or people acting in the interest of some nebulously defined "society?"
Kinda? I know that's the supposed cliche, but it doesn't really ring true. The "people's" will as defined by some collective subset of the population has certainly been a powerful influence at times, but it's far from a concept that is simply "given by the people." I don't think Pol Pot's power was given by the people. Hitler's wasn't. Xi Jinping's isn't.
And even Nancy Pelosi's isn't given in the way you imply. Through a strong network of bribing and brainwashing, our entire political system leaves us with the choice of empowering corrupt militaristic theocrats or a party that mostly uses tax dollars to bribe voters. I think a very good response to this situation is "I don't like what Pelosi is doing, but I would really hate what a republican would do in her place." And that doesn't sounds like people have much power at all.
[0]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Hall_Putsch [1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933
I think it's pretty rough to say Hitler was given power from the people in the sense that Rousseau would use the phrase.
My personal opinion is that this is immoral - and we're having this discussion because someone thought it was so immoral that they were motivated to write an article about how much they dislike it - but people write all sorts of articles so that's not a proof at the end of the day... Really, there are some things we can mostly (not all) agree are immoral like murder and rape - but even that isn't universally held (or agreed on to the same limit) because, well, some people do it. So yes - societal morals are pretty vague to define and I'm sure there are some people that feel fervently that House reps trading individual stocks is highly beneficial to society - but I feel like the majority of folks are on the other side on this one.
I don't think you'll find many fully informed people who thinks that house reps trading on insider info is good (myself included), unless they're personally beneficiaries of that system.
But this discussion isn't really about that. The original guy asked "why shouldn't she do this?" She can do it. She benefits from doing it. No one will stop her. Why is it immoral for her to do it? Which is a totally different thing from "the majority of informed people don't want her to do it." To that end, she is behaving exactly as should be expected of her given the amount of power she has.
The only way as far as I know to get people to not make decisions that are bad for the world but good for them is to not let them have the power to make that decision. The US government has become an atrocity of corrupt and consolidated power. That's the problem, IMO. And so long as its leaders can spy freely on Americans, can take 40% of their income, can deny them rights, etc, then this is what happens.
Would such a restriction be constitutional?
How would it be enforced?
Who would investigate impropriety?
2. The House Committee on Ethics[1] can recommend a few remedies including Censure and Expulsion - whether these are actually enacted is decided by a general floor vote by the whole House of Representatives.
3. The same body - the House Committee on Ethics would instigate an investigation into any suspected wrong-doings.
The House essentially has an internal police force - but whatever the Ethics Committee finds is then brought to a general house floor vote to decide on punishment. If the populace suspected the house was acting immorally the remedy is to change the representatives - these investigations are supposed to root out extreme violations of generally agreed norms in the short term, but a sea change requires the election of house members that will advocate for the new norms.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_Committee_...
This is my whole point. The Congress knows this is an issue. The House Committee on Ethics knows this is an issue. The people know this is an issue. The members of Congress who have not moved on this issue were just reelected by the people, and have now telegraphed that they will not solve this issue in the future. It will not be solved, yet these representatives will be reelected by the people again and again. The House Committee on Ethics will not investigate. If you engage in this behavior you get richer and nothing bad happens to you. If you don't engage in this behavior, you are leaving money on the table and the only person you hurt is yourself and a nebulous, distributed entity we call "society". Our former President even pardoned a Congressman for the very crime of using his privileged position to facilitate insider trading for his family! The power of the pardon is one of the most solemn expressions of the values a society holds. Taken as a whole, this tells me that actually, American society does not consider this to be a problem. So if shame is an emotion derived from the violation of societal norms, I am only asking why this should be shameful? Insider trading is in accordance with societal norms.
> If you don't engage in this behavior, you are leaving money on the table and the only person you hurt is yourself and a nebulous, distributed entity we call "society".
I disagree with this statement because I think it is putting too much necessity on maximizing personal gain - there are plenty of reasons not to engage in insider trading and refusing to do so doesn't "hurt" you.
Wrong.
The Speaker doesn't set rules on house procedure, the House as a whole does.
> She has the power to unilaterally end this practice and chooses not to.
No, she doesn't. Neither does the House alone, since at the federal level, “lawmakers” includes the Senate.
This is no place for these kinds of statements. Parent posed a question that can 100% be read charitably. In a system where all incentives promote individualism and self-interest, why should we care about others indeed.
To care about others is socialism. Or collectivism. Identity politics is probably part of the issue here, but I'm more interested in what other smarter people than me have to say, free from being shamed.
A trivial example of this would be any example of someone caring about someone else for non-selfish reasons prior to humans inventing socialism. Take your pick.
Trying to guilt-trip or shame people on HN for their views is absolutely against the HN guidelines[1] - "Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation" "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive" "When disagreeing, please reply to the argument" and so on.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That doesn't really answer the question though. If knowingly making society worse were the standard for feeling shame, I think I'd be too depressed and shame-ridden to even get out of bed. I mean, you want to talk about damaging society: every single day I get into my car and burn fossil fuels on my commute to/from work, which is essentially slowly killing the planet. I know it's bad for society, but I do it anyway. Knowingly. On purpose. Can you imagine how psychopathic I am to treat society with such casual disregard?
As another poster put it: "To feel shame is an emotional reaction to violating standards of morality."
What I'm saying is an actor in American society is beholden to the standards of morality as defined by the leaders of its community, voted into office by the people in its community. It's been shown for a while now that this behavior is accepted, expected, and tolerated. It's not only unpunished when caught, but rewarded. This is the standard of morality in my community. If shame is tied to a standard of morality, which is orthogonal as to whether it helps or harms society, then there is no basis for shame for this behavior.
> That doesn't really answer the question though. If knowingly making society worse were the standard for feeling shame, I think I'd be too depressed and shame-ridden to even get out of bed. I mean, you want to talk about damaging society: every single day I get into my car and burn fossil fuels on my commute to/from work, which is essentially slowly killing the planet. I know it's bad for society, but I do it anyway. Knowingly. On purpose. Can you imagine how psychopathic I am to treat society with such casual disregard?
I think you bring up a good idea here. I recently came across a lecture by Jaron Lanier that discusses this kind of thinking and how to reason about it.
> I came up with an image to help me think about who the beneficiary is of our activities, whether we're engineers or writers or anything else, and I called this the 'circle of empaty'.... Those who are inside the circle are the beneficiaries of what you do, and anything inside the circle deserves your empathy. Things outside the circle perhaps don't deserve your antagonism but on the other hand they're not the beneficiaries of what you do. So I hope that people believe that all human beings should be inside the circle. That's not always the case; there are racists and homophobes and many other varieties of ideological people who would like to put _some_ human beings outside the circle, but I think decent people can agree that humans belong inside... Typically liberals wish to make the circle larger and conservatives wish to make the circle smaller... If you make the circle too small you become cruel and destructive... and if you make the circle too big so that all living things are inside the circle you can't live because your body kills bacteria all the time, you essentially become incompetent
https://youtu.be/rGqiswuJuQI
I would recommend listening to at least the beginning of the talk where he goes over this idea because I think a similar approach can help with regards to contributing to environmental issues and such. For instance we can reason that it would be actually more harmful to us as a society to morally judge people who drive to the grocery store to buy themselves food so they can eat, because if people don't do that they can surely end up in a situation where they are sick and unhealthy.
On the other hand lets look at the situation we see here and ask: Would it be more harmful for society to continue to allow a small group of people who can effectively change the rules of a society be able to profit financially from these changes? I think again in this case, yes it would be more harmful!
We have to think about how things can get out of hand if we do not have the right checks and balances. Like Jaron mentions in his lecture, conservatism and the shrinking of the circle can go out of control like we saw with Germany after the first World War. We should aim to have _all of society_ within this circle of empathy, and not just _me and my family and friends_. If we can legally disincentivize people in power from shrinking their circle of empathy in these areas I think it is a net benefit for us as a society and sets a foundation for what we should find morally worth our empathy.
This is quite likely a slow moving change going on unnoticed for decades, until it crosses a threshold were it starts to become quite visible. And possibly a major danger to society as we know it.
The big question is are we before or after the threshold, and can we reverse the process anyway?
All power seems to behave like this. Republicans, Democrats, Communists, corporate titans, office politickers.
I am not American but I do live in a country that has a government. It's curious to see stories of people going from <citizen grunt> to <elected official> and then using their power and insight for personal gain, while never capitalizing on opportunity to force the changes that were campaigned on, when presented with unique chances to force the issue to be resolved.
There's such a focus on "getting it right, the first time" instead of "anything will be better than nothing, and we can re-iterate on this in the future".
An issue with government is much like the issues you face at work every day; too much focus on introducing "new", and seemingly never enough time to evaluate and improve "existing".
If you're no longer convinced of that, it's because you are looking for justifications for defect in the prisoner's dilemma, rather than cooperate.
Just a heads up.
See, we more or less structured the US on the Hobbesian state of nature, wherein we're all supposed to be greedy, self-centered, and violent. This was rife with induction and failed to account for a litany of examples that simply weren't present. It's old hat that never got scraped off, but now it's baked into literally everything we do.
But because the fundament of our system is developed on that conception of humanity, it contributes to the conditioning of the people laboring under it. My favorite thought experiment: My ex used to accuse me of cheating, I'd have to explain myself, she'd go through my phone, we'd argue; at that point, being punished for the crime, I had may as well cheat to reap the benefits of my just desserts. The Hobbesian affair is a slight alteration in the logical apparatus there - you're not being greedy so you won't be rewarded.
I'll credit the system this: I suspect a more "social" (via Rousseau) view would have immense difficulty in defense against the Hobbesian man. We're by nature, and the dint of our calling as humans (cooperative apes) intrinsically trusting. Granted, there are some conditionals, and some conditioning that as we grow wise, a skepticism emerges. To me that says a system that doesn't employ the Hobbesian mode, is highly susceptible to it. If your institutions are, historically, pristine in execution for a long period the social expectation would eventually gravitate to certainty. When some bad actor is seated, a little sophistry could go a long way in creating a system of exploitation. Something like that...
Most people, I think, and this is borne out by my own experience - just want left alone to their lives. The chains aren't uncomfortable until you find their limits, and as long as you don't reach that you're hardly aware of them after spending a life captive in their grasp. This coupled with intrinsic trust, and the world's inundations, add liberally debt and the construction of the social standard of "good" and "success" and you've managed to culminate a great ethical slavery.
Ultimately though, whether we're fighting fire with fire, the fact remains that we're pressing people to do exactly as you did. Offering a free ascension on a staircase made of the backs of mankind, blaming those who fail to acede to it on a moral basis, and complaining about the living who one tromps upon.
As to organizing, that's a joke. We've really not trialed any other approach at scale sans Marxism, itself a joke. And collectivization of small elements hardly marks a real difference when it's plainly easy to exploit.
I really found your entire comment very insightful. To the above quote, most people do want to be left alone, the rest want to tell those people what to do.
> The general theme of "The Prince" is of accepting that the aims of princes – such as glory and survival – can justify the use of immoral means to achieve those ends.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prince
Most people think Machiavelli was a jerk.
- - - -
Really the question to ask yourself isn't "Why shouldn’t I seek power to enrich myself and my friends?", the question is "What is the best method to achieve happiness for myself and my friends?"
In my opinion it's not a solution but it is another way to limit the amount of this kind of trading.
Through the 80s and 90s, I recall politicians and talking heads using the phrase "...even the appearance of impropriety". I'm tempted to conclude there's something telling about the way this quaint phrase seems to have disappeared.
EDIT: not saying term limits are the answer, just that I can see the relationship suggested.
I do agree that politicians aren't even trying to avoid the appearance of impropriety. Their response seems to be that in the absence of absolute proof of impropriety then any appearance of it is ok.
The Democrats held the House of Representatives for something like 40 years straight until 1994. You had famous scandals involving entrenched Democratic Congressmen. In 1994 Republicans made term limits a rallying point and they took over the House. Both parties have since jostled for control of the House. But when Republicans had the power they did not impose term limits. It’s just a rallying point and will do nothing to stop corruption. There may be good reasons for term limits but anti-corruption isn’t one of them.
I like to think people's terms limit would be reached before they get jaded and cynical.. At the very least, it would reduce the number of years (and hence the total amount of money) lobbyists, etc. would be focused on them. Someone that might think $100K in lobbyist money isn't worth the risk of repercussions, might think $1M (over time) is.
I think at the worst, we'd be right where we are now...
Plus with term limits, at least we'd be rid of them, instead of having them perpetually come back...
However, the litmus test would probably be if we actually get term limits.. After all, if they're that corrupt, they won't vote against their own interests.
"Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government"
by Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels.
https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Realists-Elections-Responsi...
If you want democratically elected representatives to be able to gain power over the machinery of government, then you should advocate for longer terms, without limits. If every Senator was elected for 15 years, we would get better government.
Senate terms are 6 years, not 2.
We’re talking about the suggestion “if every Senator were elected for 15 years...
Which, yes, was an odd suggestion in this thread for the reason you point out, sure.
We'd be right back where we are now - people server 30+ years, so entrenched in serving their own good and not the public good.
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/democracy-for-realists-part...
With 15 year terms, that can't happen on any reasonable timetable, either. If you maintained the three-class system, you’d have 1/3 of the Senate elected every five years. If you kept roughly equal sets every two years you'd have 2/15 (13-14 out of 100) every 2 years.
The proposal was for Senators specifically. This is clearly different, but it's not clear what it is. So, is your proposal:
(1) to abolish the Senate, and do this in the House, or (2) to abolish the House, and do this to the Senate, maintains equal representation (540 not being divisible by 50 makes this problematic), (3) to abolish the House, and do this to the Senate without equal representation, or (4) to do this to the House, but retain the Senate as is, or (5) something else?
Note that #3 and arguably #1 are outside the power of even a Constitutional Amendment, since the power to amend the Constitution explicitly does not extend to removing equal representation of states in the Senate.
> Of course, when one side has a large lead, it means they are safe for a few months
A 4 seat (<1%) lead is safe for 6 mmonths. A 16 seat (3%) lead is safe for 15 months. A margin the proportional size of that after the 2018 House election in the US would take losing every seat up for election for 3 years, 9 months to lose. These are small margins; a large lead is absolutely secure for lot longer than “a fee months”.
> The important thing to realize is that most of the current problems with
I’m fully behind that. Long legislative terms just is a very bad idea that is hyperfocused on one (overstated) problem and which makes (almost independent of what else you try to do alongside) most other problems worse.
You make it sound like that is a long time. In Britain, the Fixed-term Parliaments Act of 2011 makes it unlikely there will be many elections held at less than 5 years.
But having a safe majority that is locked in for longer than 5 years can bring benefits. The evidence is overwhelming that the current majority is, at all times, ignorant, irrational, biased, bigoted and impulsive. Therefore, we should want all real power to be in the hands of the long-term majority, not the current majority. Big changes should come from majorities that manage to survive for several years.
I believe you are a software developer? So you should understand the concept that a signal can be derived from a noisy source, given enough time.
It is compared to the claim that “a large margin is safe for a few months”.
> In Britain, the Fixed-term Parliaments Act of 2011 makes it unlikely there will be many elections held at less than 5 years.
Yes, but it assures that 100% of seats will be elected in 5 years, and that no majority is safe for longer than that and none takes more than a majority of the elections in that time to overturn.
> The evidence is overwhelming that the current majority is, at all times, ignorant, irrational, biased, bigoted and impulsive
No, the evidence is that effectively representative, responsive democracies produce the best results for their people. The US mostly fails on effective representation, and the proposed change would compound that by making it also fail on responsiveness.
> Big changes should come from majorities that manage to survive for several years.
Sure, maybe, that's why procedures that require long (e.g., multistage, with legally or practically mandatory delays) process for major changes arguably make sense.
But rendering any substantial majority effectively immune to change once established defeats the purpose of that. If the argument is correct at all, it is that big changes should come from legislative majorities that survive for an extended time because they represent a durable majority in the electorate.
But tbh, if I had the answers, I'd run for govt :-D
It bugs me that every representative we elect is expected to have their own plan other than to "represent". Fast talk and snappy speeches are cheap. Willingness to acquire deep understanding, be challenged, and even sometimes put your own convictions aside for your constituents, and the systems that exist to serve them? That's hard.
I'm an outsider! They yell, as they have private meetings for billions.
Pelosi has been in office for 18 terms... so how hasn't she been able to "fix the system"?
https://www.amazon.com/10-Less-Democracy-Should-Elites/dp/15...
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/what-i-hope-to-prove
'Sokay, the architecture is fundamentally flawed, in part because it was designed when less was known about the pragmatics of representative democracy because of less extensive experience and no systematic research and analysis, but also because in some parts it was designed with bad purpose (notably, entrenching chattel slavery.)
Undermining the whole architecture ought to be the goal.
Some people dislike the idea of legislators serving long terms. I've always wondered why, exactly, we are comfortable with judges serving long terms, but not legislators.
What's really needed is an end to backwards plurality voting and monopolistic primaries - have one big runoff vote. Make voting for better candidates not be at odds with accepting the safe option. Of course no politician is going to support this, as marketing themselves as the lesser of two evils has become the entirety of their promotion.
Furthermore, get rid of terms and have every single office on the ballot every single year, or better yet every quarter. This would make it much harder to spend overwhelmingly on campaigns (since the campaign would never end). It would also provide a stage for challengers to gain momentum organically rather than this long-iterated process where a challenger becomes viable in one cycle only to be forgotten the next time.
Sure, but long terms make the democratically elected representatives are less representative of the public will because of lack of immediate accountability.
What would be better is current terms, absence of term limits, and candidate-centered proportional—e.g., by single transferrable vote (STV)—elections in multimember districts (say, up to 5 member districts for the House, two-member for the Senate by putting those from the same state in the same class and electing them together), so that typically there is some choice at the general election within parties (e.g., a party with an incumbent but not all the seats available would usually be incentivized to run at least one more candidate to contest for a potential additional seat) and more viable parties, so that you have both accountability and representatives that are durable in office if they retain popular support.
> If every Senator was elected for 15 years, we would get better government.
If every Senator was elected for 15 years, we get government even more detached from the popular will, both legislatively, executively (because of the Senates veto of top executive appointments), and in judicial selection.
And the reduced accountability would supercharge corruption, too.
Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels present an abundance of evidence that there is no popular will. The public does not understand the issues. The voters do not know what they want. Achen and Bartels also make the interesting argument that when there is more than one issue (more than one dimension) it becomes difficult to build a 51% coalition that also has 51% support on every issue, and where there are, say, 100 issues, it becomes almost mathematically impossible to build a 51% coalition that also holds the popular position on every issue. Put differently, to win elections, politicians must advocate for some deeply unpopular issues. This is the most important thing to understand if we are going to understand "Why elections do not bring about responsive government." (the subtitle of the book).
On the other issue, that the public is ignorant of most issues, remains a real concern.
If one takes that seriously, the solution is to abandon elections and the pretense of democracy entirely.
Arend Lijphart, on the other hand, has shown that there is a public will, people do know what they want, and that democratic systems with greater electoral proportionality deliver it to them better and make them happier with government.
That does not follow at all. The benefits of democracy have been well-documented -- as well documented as the fact that the voters don't understand the issues and do not know what they want. The evidence on both points is overwhelming. Those facts are not in contradiction to each other, rather, it is clear that the benefits of democracy do not come from the voters. The benefits must come from somewhere else:
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/democracy-for-realists-part...
"Take, for instance, money. A small team of highly ethical individuals can generally trust one another to safeguard money in an appropriate way. Many small churches and family businesses are run this way, with loose controls over who can deposit or spend. However, as a company grows, the chance you'll hire an unethical individual also grows. At a certain scale it is almost certain that a worker will steal some money, if they have the chance to do so. So a company must impose rules about handling money, and there needs to be a process for paying bills, with someone authorized to write checks and use the company credit cards. This is the beginning of your financial bureaucracy, and the tight limit on who holds the authority to spend is the beginning of hierarchy in this area."
"Is this a bad thing? Again, you'll confuse yourself if you think about this in terms of good or bad. Just focus on your goals. What strengths do you want to build into your organization?"
"Nowadays, there is a widespread idea that bureaucracy makes an organization rigid. But consider the ways that a well-designed bureaucracy for money control can make your organization more flexible. If you decide to keep your money control bureaucracy small then you'll also need to keep your purchasing process simple, perhaps by centralizing all purchasing decisions in the hands of the CEO or CFO. That one individual then becomes a choke point that limits progress – nothing can get done until they find time to pay some bills and buy some necessary materials or services. And there is an obvious limit on how much the company can grow when the authority to pay a bill is so limited. But even when the money handling bureaucracy grows to three or four people, that’s still not enough to oversee complex spending patterns, so your company will still be forced to follow simple and inflexible rules. By contrast, what if you wanted to decentralize the power to make purchases? What if you wanted to empower each team with the ability to make whatever purchases they felt they needed, up to some reasonable limit? That would make your organization much more flexible, but it also makes it more difficult to track the money, and therefore it requires a larger bureaucracy for tracking each dollar. My point is, the larger bureaucracy can actually help enable some kinds of decentralized decision making, and thus improve the agility of the organization. A growing bureaucracy does not automatically equal growing inflexibility, rather, the whole point is to try to maintain flexibility at scale."
An excerpt from:
"Don't make a fetish of having flat organization"
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/dont-make-a-fetish-of-havin...
Term limits won't get us there. We need to go in the other direction.
Working for a long time on a given problem may make one competent, but it doesn't make one good.
Electing Senators for life is essentially what we have now, and that seems to be working spectacularly.
- No federal employee making in excess of 2x (3x?) poverty level may remain on the job for more than 8 years. Possible exemptions: senators + enlisted military personnel. (Need more turnover at the top of officer corps anyway)
- No appointee federal bureaucrat may remain on the job for more than 8 years
- Any appointed bureaucrat or elected official, will have a fixed 79% and 99% tax bracket on any income in excess of the high watermark of the average income in the 5 years preceding their appointment or election.
There. Fixed it. Want to serve?
Do it for duty Not for money.
I'm ambivalent on term limits for House members like Pelosi, though. They are representatives for the people of the States, and as such the people they represent have the right and ability to kick them out, or not. There is also the argument that would you rather have a dog that knows where the bones are buried, or a dog that digs up the whole yard?
That said, members of Congress should have severe restrictions on investing for themselves and their immediate family. They either need to police it themselves, or there needs to be some kind of law that covers it. Not that that is going to happen, as we have the ultimate in foxes guarding the henhouse in our government these days, but it would make for a powerful populist position if anybody had the courage to push it.
That might be tolerable, right after we reduce the powers of the Senate to those of the British House of Lords, which it's original theory of representation is as outdated and inconsistent with representative democracy as, and transfer it's para-executive functions to the House.
Pelosi is a Representative, so none of those things are true here.
instead of 100 senators, let's have 100 per state [0]. instead of 1 representative per 750,000, let's go back to the original 1 per 30,000, giving us 11,000 representatives. let's have 99 supreme court justices, rather than 9. let's elect all the cabinet positions directly and separately. instead of multi-year terms, let's vote every single year for each representative office, and make election day a mandatory-paid holiday for everyone (to give folks time to research and consider their votes). let's convert many more administrative positions to elected offices. repeal citizen's united, which flooded political campaigns with unlimited amounts of corporate money (giving the wealthy even more disproportionate voice on top of their already disproportionate voice).
it's be messy at times, but we don't get good civics and good governance without the people being given more time and space to think about governance in depth.
[0]: alternatively, we could divide up states into smaller entities, which would be even better for decentralizing power (and limiting corruption), but that's much harder to do.
This is precisely why individual states can stand up to the federal government -- people in California could make policies that devastate Maryland, for example. Not because they want to, but because they lack context --- even reasonable authority.
However, there are some states that don’t pay their legislators at all and that comes with its own problems.
Give the voters the ability to pick more than two options.
Nobody is saying what she is doing is explicitly illegal. But it's abundantly unethical and, imo, a clear abuse of power. Her tone deaf response in this story only adds fuel to the controversy.
Also, $60k isn't that much, considering Wyden usually raises between $4 and $8 million during a reelection year.
My guess is that he would be more swayed by the fact that Nike is one of the largest employers in Oregon.
Like it or hate it, this is the system we have, I don't see any evidence that Wyden is being bought off any more than any other Senator that accepts campaign donations from special interests (which is all of them).
That's about the foreign emoluments clause (which already applies to other public officials including Congress), not the Presidential (domestic) emoluments clause, which is about the President getting money or other material benefit other than those legally due to his office from the federal or state government (which was also an issue with Trump's DC hotel, for many reasons, just not “foreign leaders staying there”.)
I don't get it. Is it just sport at this point?
Yes, there are centrist neo-liberals in both parties. They don't want Bernie Sanders types or Donald Trump types to be elected.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2021/07/08/inside-n...
California can't be bothered not to elect this evil person that is the absolute epitome of corruption.
Except in the tiniest (by population) states, states at large do not elect members to the House, despite the fact that they are frequently identified by party and state.
California is the maximum example of the error of this kind of description.
When someone does a lot of trading, it is easy to cherry pick the successful trades or apparently conflicted trades while ignoring the whole picture, and scope of the portfolio.
(The 3rd most powerful person in our elite ruling class, mind you)
According to this they invest heavy in mostly big tech, probably similar to a lot of people here https://housestockwatcher.com/summary_by_rep/Hon.%20Nancy%20...
I think the public should be given notice immediately when Congress members purchase or sell shares/options. I think they should also have to hold on to shares/options for a certain length of time. I think this could solve most problems.
Is this the right question? Insider trading is incredibly hard to prove as it is. But we know that Pelosi is privy to insider information. She's an 82 year old centimillionaire, does she really need to be day-trading options?
https://unusualwhales.com/i_am_the_senate/congress
> As of December 22nd stimulus was just approved on that day. On December 22'nd, Pelosi’s Husband purchased deep ITM TSLA and AAPL calls. After Market close on December 22'nd, she voiced support for $2000 of stimulus after Donald Trump tweets the need for additional stimulus. Those same companies rally 5%, giving an instant +30 return, on Dec 23rd.
“Primaried” usually refers to opposing in a partisan primary (as a way of distinguishing those people from other electors opponents.)
California has for some time not used partisan primaries except as part of the Presidential nominating process.
No, they aren't, they universally include numerous parties and independents, including Republicans, as well as Democrats.
They general election after the top-two nonpartisan primary is sometimes Dem v. Dem, though that’s only happened in exactly one (2020) of Pelosi’s five elections since the top-two nonpartisan primary was adopted, so even if you meant the general rather than the primary, “usually” is far misplaced.
I’m not sure which seat and which election you are talking about, but that would be consistent with the Republican strategy of trying to discourage more candidates from running, because that way vote splitting worms in their favor, maximizing their chance of making it into the top 2 and maximizing their perceived strength going into the general. Party leaders have been fairly open about their strategy of dealing with the top-two primary system.
> The Republican didn’t really even show up to various debates and round tables.
That's also a pretty common Republican strategy where there would be more than two candidates on the stage in California, on the theory (which has some support) that the hits coming out of such a forum will be on the candidates involved.
This dead reply could not be more sound, and plausible. It was downvoted due to a dogpile of political disagreements, sadly. I am beyond excited to say "we told you so" when the populace is ready to acknowledge it, and gets beyond its hatred founded on veritable lies about a single man.
While we're talking about Pelosi, it was rather funny to see how she has reacted to the Mark Meadows texts recently, which single-handedly disprove the Left's January 6 claims of Trump's involvement, a baseless conspiracy theory from start to finish.
I truly can't wait until we no longer tolerate fabricated political scandals ruining the fabric of society by deceiving people to act their ugliest towards otherwise average people.
Raw evidence or blind willful ignorance, take your pick — from a centrist's perspective:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoiqEVG55N0
Uh, Meadows’ texts do no such thing.
We're not seeing their corporate media buddies belabor trivial information or twisting it to manipulate people into thinking it serves as evidence against Trump.
In fact, in the video I linked, it shows a clip from CNN of all places supporting my point because they can't even twist it.
Willful ignorance is a choice, it's just nice when folks are more honest about it.
On what basis do you claim they did?
I mean, sure, it might look like they had if they didn't question Meadows about it when he showed up to testify after they got it...but he didn't, which is why he’s facing a contempt referral. Short of that, other than it's absence from any final report, I’m not sure what concrete sign would exist that they had “dropped” it at all.
> We're not seeing their corporate media buddies belabor trivial information or twisting it to manipulate people into thinking it serves as evidence against Trump.
While I agree with the exact wording here, as what is being belabored is not trivial and the analysis of how it is evidence against Trump and his inner circle is not twisted, the media that's not full-time right-wing propaganda is indeed pointing to them as a “smoking gun”, so, if “major media pundits aren't claiming that they are evidence against Trump” is the basis of your claim that the committee is dropping the texts, the premise is as faulty as the logic (a few examples of thousands):
https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/14/politics/mark-meadows-text-me...
https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/14/politics/january-6-committee-...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/12/13/mark-mead...
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a38514277/mar...
About the best you can say for the texts is that they are sometimes being treated as less of a smoking gun than the PowerPoint presentation on the strategy for the coup turned over by Meadows.
This woman is 82 years old and a leader of a nominally left-wing party.
So given the choice between: 1. taking a principled stand against the use of political access for financial gain, and dying in a few years with a NW of $100m 2. defending insider trading, and dying in a few years with a NW for $150m
It's worth asking what cultural programming would make someone even consider #2. It's not the usual reasons people want more money. There is no hedonic utility, no extra financial independence, no added social status that comes with #2.
I have no problem with accumulating wealth as a means to an end. But if you're willing to compromise your legacy to run that score up a little higher, you're an npc & you've lost the plot.
* We've had 3X murders more than "covid deaths" last year.
* We have people dying on the street - you have to literally walk over them.
* We have human shit everywhere.
* The mayor's ex-boyfriend was arrested by the FBI for stealing money from the "clean streets program".
* They banned natural gas and it is ~40 F right now.
* She repeatedly gets away without wearing a mask (in the hair salon, at the Getty wedding, etc.) while us plebes get violently assaulted for not having our mask on 'properly' in the fucking grocery store.
* The school board refers to Asian Americans as "house niggers" and won't leave until people bribe her with a package of tens of millions of dollars.
* They tried to rename the schools from names like Washington and Lincoln. Why? I don't know Lincoln, a republican, wrote this document called the emancipation proclamation - apparently freeing a bunch of slaves or something.
* You can't enter a restaurant or most any business inside the city without showing your papers - even if you are tripled/quadruple vaxd and you are wearing a mask.
* Oh yeh, I forgot, you can legally rape a 14 year old boy but not a 14 year old girl.
Man, this fucking list is endless. I hope San Francisco is the first city the Chinese bomb with their nuclear tipped hyper-sonics.
Did you know that the school board calls asian americans "house niggers" ?
Did you know that Pelosi repeatedly gets away without wearing a mask inside even though all of us will get yelled at if we don't have the mask above the nose in the grocery store, present our vax pass and be tripled or quad vaxd?
Also, keep in mind that regulation creates insiders of its own. Regulation always degenerates into a weapon of the corrupt.
Without regulation we would have a real hellscape.
It turns out you can't trust "the market" to do the right thing - ever.
Also, frankly, I don't appreciate the sass. It isn't necessary.
That's an easy target to sass, because it's such an easy target. Did I reply to wrong comment or something? Maybe it's because I'm on mobile. Apologies if I replied to the wrong person.
There is no point in arguing against a false representation of someone's view. This is childish and intellectually unhygenic. It's noise.
Snake oil is always legal. It's legal now.
By definition, it's impossible to make all snake oil illegal. Think about all the crypto scams. They count. Even if crypto were outlawed, people will always come up with new "snake oil."
This is off topic. Let's drop it.
I think this is extremely unfair, as in your own pedantry seems fine, where you are correct only for very spesific and us-centric definition of 'force' and 'snakeoil'.
You free market people can't even agree if patents and copyright are part of free market. I had one of you tell me that endentured servitude was part of freedom of contract.
You seem to think we should leave snake oil salesmen alone, so it seems free market includes freedom to defraud the customer. Does it also include freedom to defraud the company?
This 'free market' is a spherical cow and would collapse into anarchy from pissed off people shooting each-other, it's no more viable than communism is.
Assuming good faith keeps discussion here at a high level. Let's not descend to strawmen. If you disagree with javert but do not wish to engage the argument, you do not need to respond.
Not really. Why can't companies make "no insider trading" as a condition to employment?
Do you not understand the difference between a rule for employees, and the law?
You really hit the nail on the head here. Members of Congress (and their staff) should either simply be held to the already existing rules on insider trading. They should not be able to act upon material non public information. They should be subject to trading windows and restrictions. They should not be able to vote on any legislation affecting held securities. Don't want to be subject to the rules? Set up a blind trust like the rest of us would have to.
If Congress is going to be held to a different standard than the rest of us, it should be a higher standard, not a more lax one.
This is the law, and has been since 2012 [1].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STOCK_Act
I'm not saying it never happens, but I think it's difficult to separate "insider trading" from "getting lucky" when you're talking about 538 generally well-off, active traders.
It's like when a CEO offloads stock before it drops and everyone loses their minds. But if you dig in to the story, the CEO is just selling stock on a regular schedule.
It was the law for approximately 1 year.
I suggest you read the amendment [0] to the STOCK Act that was quietly passed the following year, 2013. It largely rendered the STOCK Act useless.
[0] (PDF) https://web.archive.org/web/20140419032033/http://www.gpo.go...
This is false.
The bill [1] makes it harder to access records for e.g. Congressional staffers [2]. But insider trading restrictions for everyone remain. And the disclosure requirements for members of Congress are virtually untouched.
[1] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BILLS-113s716cps/pdf/BIL...
[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2013/04/16/17749...
>"The database itself is almost meaningless," says Holman. He says the only option for those who want to get a comprehensive look at what some 2,900 staffers have filed is to review the cases one by one. "And that's just too big a job for anybody to do."
>The STOCK Act was supposed to make this task significantly easier. Records for members of Congress, the executive branch and their staffs were supposed to be posted online in a searchable, sortable and downloadable format.
>If you wanted to see who traded health care stock just before a committee acted on a health care bill, it would be easy. No trips to the basement required.
Taking the database offline due to identity theft concerns is understandable.
What isn't defensible is making it impossible to query the records in a useful way even onsite. SQL was 43 years old in 2013. It's perhaps unobvious to a nontechnical person, but the average reader of Hacker News should immediately recognize that it isn't normal to be unable to search a database of textual records, whose total size is probably less than 10 TB.
I agree. But this doesn't apply to members of Congress. Their trades are available online [1].
[1] https://www.smartinsider.com/politicians/
That's not what insider trading is, though. Insiders are, well, inside.
If you come across non-public information as an outsider, you are of course free to trade on it. Congresspeople are, theoretically, at odds with companies (as they impose regulation restraining those companies) and it's hard to view them as having a duty of any kind to the company itself.
In socialism, if you have power you can get money.
I guess in a mixed economy, it flows both ways.
There are two groups of people who laugh at the law: those who break it, and those who make it.
A market that is unregulated ends up with monopolies and huge power dynamics as the old guard is able to pool capital through momentum and compounding forces. Good regulation reduces the power imbalance so David has the possibility to defeat Goliath and they can fight on even ground.
Like most of government, they won't take their hand out of the cash drawer until someone threatens to put cuffs on it.
I get iffier on this when you regulate family members. Children? Siblings? Parents? You'd be forcing a good number of Congressional spouses to retire if you implemented this without a gradual implementation.
I'd like to see lawmakers subject to similar restrictions as other insiders; having to openly plan their stock sales/purchases at least several months out. If you want a more actively managed portfolio than that, hire a financial firm to run a blind trust for you.
Call me jaded, but boo-hoo, so be it. The power and privileges that come with being so close to someone in power surely make up for the loss of being able to trade stocks.
Not saying that family members should have unfettered abilities to trade, but having to use something like a trading plan or announcing trades prior or even just (gasp) enforcing insider trading laws against them, would be terrific.
Limiting Congress to people who can independently afford the income/expense hit might not be optimal.
86th percentile is more than sufficient for representatives of the people.
no one is denying they should be paid for their work we're wish to deny them the right to fuck over working americans to line their pockets.
they can easily pass a bill to fund lodgings for congress critters in DC if they wanted. it'd certainly be cheaper for americans than this corruption.
Well, sure; why would the wealthy incumbents want to make it easier for new, not-independently-wealthy candidates to break in? You probably limit the AOC-style folks a bit by not adjusting for inflation.
> they can easily pass a bill to fund lodgings for congress critters in DC if they wanted
I kinda like that idea; a little Versailles-y.
That said, I do think it would be entirely legitimate to prohibit government service outside of the enlisted (non-officer) military ranks for direct relations of politicians during and some time after their term in office, it would just take a constitutional amendment and some very carefully thought out details.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STOCK_Act
I think the general consensus is essentially “fairness” for utilitarian reasons. Markets are important, and insider trading discourages investment because it creates an impression of unfairness and increases uncertainty.
As far as I know that's how the law is structured. A second source that say the same thing:
>KESTENBAUM: And she says while everybody gets upset at insider trading because it gives someone an unfair advantage, that is not the legal reason why it gets you into trouble. The argument used these days in court for why it's illegal is that insider trading amounts to stealing information from a company. It's like theft. And so for that reason, proving that someone traded on insider information - that is not enough to convict them. If, say, a financial document from some company blows out the window, and you happen to find it sitting there on the sidewalk, Sarah says it's not insider trading for you to use that to make money in the stock market because you didn't steal it.
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/460689797
As for your "fairness" hypothesis, it really doesn't hold. Is it "fair" that hedge funds can afford to spend millions on alternative data sources (eg. flying helicopters with thermal cameras over oil fields, to see how much oil is being stored) to get a edge over traders who can't? Probably not. Is it banned? No. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2013-12-19/helico...
2. that sounds more applicable to sellers of securities (ie. "you can't hide stuff in your quarterly statements") than insider trading.
Okay, but that's not how laws work. You can't go to the judge and say, "your honor, this person violated the SEC's mission statement and is therefore a criminal!". The mission statement might be correlated with what the law says (it might also not be, see: "to serve and protect"), but the ultimate source of truth is statues/precedence. Given that your claims contradicts what two well credentials individuals[1] claim, it seems prudent to require more evidence than just "that's SEC's mission statement". A link to the exact section of the relevant statue, or a relevant appellate court decision would do.
[1] matt levine was "a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, and a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit", and the person interviewed for the NPR story was "a defense attorney" and "now a fellow at Yale Law School".
>full name of the ‘33 Act and ‘34 Act.
Same argument as above.
Do you have any evidence of this, or are you repeating something you read on Reddit/Twitter/Facebook etc?
Senators dumping stocks prior to the pandemic shutdowns, for example.
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/488593-four-senators-sol...
Reading between the lines, however, I do think people have a right to be upset due to indirect evidence.
The latter is public record. She and her husband have drastically outperformed the market for years. I think the former is undeniable given her job. Just a comment about an industry she likes or doesn't like can impact share prices.
They don't make it easy to link to specific queries, but you can pull up her financial filings here: https://disclosures-clerk.house.gov/PublicDisclosure/Financi...
For evidence that she has inside information, I'd encourage you to read the wiki article for Speaker of The House, especially the sections that go over their legislative and committee-steering powers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speaker_of_the_United_States_H...
There's no smoking gun audio recording where Nancy Pelosi specifically says "Hey Paul, I'm gonna launch an investigation against Facebook and accuse them of being a monopoly tomorrow, so sell your shares now!"
I could lose my job for insider trading even without that direct proof of causality, just trading stock with material insider info leads to a presumption of wrongdoing. Since Pelosi nominally works for us, maybe she (and the rest of Congress) should be held to the same standard?
I don't think the claim is particularly incredible like you claim: around 50 members of Congress have been punished for violating the STOCK Act with fines often as high as $200.
Same reason celebrities largely date other celebrities.
Hair Gel NAZI FUCK!
In principle yes, but this really does seem like an impossibly idealistic goal. We would practically have to repeal the last 150 years of American government, probably more, to get back to semblance of this ideal. It would also require a fundamental cultural shift in how the citizenry views the role of government. From my perspective the younger generations yearn for more government intervention, not less. You would have to undo that mindset through multiple decades of influence.
One thing I think our Constitution needs is an explicitly protected right of nullification. That adds an additional check on passed laws for when multiple branches of government are aligned with the same faction.
We are currently seeing some states practice their implicit right of nullification and it is beautiful.
Yes, we're an free-market economy, or at least an imperfect approximation of that.
No, that doesn't mean insider trading is ok. And since lawmakers are privy to information that can materially move stocks, and is not always generally known to the public, they should definitely qualify as insiders.
> “Immediate Family” generally means any relative by blood or marriage living in the individual’s household, any domestic partner or other minor child residing in his or her household and, whether or not living in the individual’s household, any other relative with respect to whose investments the individual has influence or control.
[1]https://www.sec.gov/rules/final/ia-2256.htm#P72_13634
This is not some kind lf 'goctcha, i am so smart', all accountants, bank employees and traders are subject to these industry-standard restrictions.
Congress has been explicitly exempted from insider trading regulations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STOCK_Act
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970203711104577199...
https://www.congressionalinstitute.org/2018/08/16/can-member...
So let's say that prior to being elected someone's heavy into telecoms for some reason. Keep the positions! Keep them as long as you want. If you want to sell, go ahead. If you want to buy back in? Sure, but index funds only.
There's still some room for abuse there but it vastly reduces the opportunity for abuse.
You’ve given us a proposal, but how do you implement it? Surely a proposal doesn’t solve anything, you have to implement it to actually solve something. So how do you implement your proposal?
Not so easy… first you need a bill to pass. It has to be put to a vote by Nancy Pelosi, who said she won’t support your solution. So you need to get rid of her: either she retires or loses reelection (unlikely) or you get a Republican speaker.
Would a Republican speaker put your bill to a vote? Certainly not after Nancy Pelosi cited “free market capitalism” as a reason for resisting restrictions. The Republican speaker can’t be portrayed as being to the left of Pelosi, who has been interchangeably labeled a “liberal communist socialist democrat leftist”.
And then there is the vote itself. Even if you get it to a vote, you are asking a group of people to take away a benefit to themselves. They are literally voting on whether to make themselves poorer. Is that going to be an easy vote to whip? Not likely.
And then if it does pass, then you have enforcement issues. There was just an issue of Congressman Collins getting convicted of insider trading for giving tips to his son. He was caught on tape. He pleaded guilty. 2 years he was sentenced. He should be serving his sentence right now. Instead he is a free man, the beneficiary of a Presidential Pardon for his crimes.
So even if you pass you pass the hurdle of the speaker; even if you pass the hurdle of the vote; even if you enforce the law on the books through the criminal justice system with courts, judges, evidence, and a sentence; EVEN THEN the powers that be will find a way to remain unconstrained by your solution. “Laws are for thee, not for me.”
So yea, we can throw out “easy solutions” all day that are really just proposals that will do nothing to solve this problem. Because this is a problem of the powerful self-dealing, and you don’t solve that through the system they use to deal themselves.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/pei-blin...
I work for a publicly traded company. I am only allowed to purchase stock in the company during certain windows, and IIRC, only in certain amounts. I can't trade or play with options related to the stock at any other time.
When I worked for a bank (in IT, but still) there was plenty of training on not making trades on non-public knowledge.
---
On one hand, I understand how a blanket ban on stock trading would seem harsh, but it seems there is no alternative given the feckless enforcement of existing insider trading regs in Congress.
They should all be offered a series of mutual fund options with different growth/risk targets, kind of like 401k packages, and that be that.
Pelosi saying "it's a free market" is a non sequitur. It's angering and embarrassing that she is so incompetent or brazenly dismissive of real concerns.
I really hope that we get just enough "clean" politicians in the near future to drive popular will towards more transparency and regulation on the topic.
I assume you are an officer at the company in question? I've never heard of a general restriction on employees buying stock in their own publicly traded company, aside from specific employees in certain positions.
All employees are restricted by trading windows. I'm not sure if this is explicitly required by law, or a condition of employment in order to not get anyone in trouble - I don't know how my company would know if I traded on my own, so I assume it's law.
There is no /freedom/ in our markets. There are plenty of items that are unavailable. There are plenty of restrictions on trade. There are massive tariffs on trade. There are limits on the amount of monies spent or earned.
The concept of a free-market scares the politicians in America, and those politicians do everything in their power to prevent exactly that; a free-market.
Of course, the rest of the population who also managed to survive the nineties remember them in much, much less rosy terms... and there were quite some number of those who did not survive, but eh, why care about those losers? As the first Minister of Economy and Finances of Russia himself said, "we're living during the tectonic changes and reforms, and the death of those who were incapable to adapt to the market is an inevitable part of the process".
What are you on about?
Lets run a quick thought test:
Are you for or against people selling: - bio-weapons to kids on the street?
- heroin?
What about sending money to North Korea?
What about... you get the point
Free-Market means no restriction on market, the magical self-regulation will restrict undesired transactions somehow.
What modern economies have are:
Open, fair markets, overseen by governments to ensure its fair and open. They are not somehow communist because they regulate and ensure baby milk is free of heavy metals and paint has no lead in it.
As such, statements like "The concept of a free-market scares the politicians in America" as if it were achievable in the strict context the poster requires ("There is no /freedom/ in our markets") are a bit silly. Why would they be scared of something that literally can't exist?
Proponents of communism similarly like to use the "well that wasn't real communism" to evade critiques of the real-world implementations of it.
The easiest example that I see is the continued long term growth of the stock and the real estate markets. (Disclosure, I'm invested in those markets too). It's pretty easy to imagine passing stock- and real estate-friendly legislation, which is great for me, but not necessarily great for society as a whole, and not necessarily done by any kind of majority consent.
But at least in the case of a blind trust, while you can't eliminate conflict of interest altogether, at least it makes the conflict more transparent.
The Roman cursus honorum had many flaws, but enforcing an up-or-out mentality that discouraged officials lurking in the same position for forty years was not one of them.
You win your first election as Quaestor, then you are a senator for life (provided you maintain the minimum property qualification of 2 million sesterces). But to win higher magistracies, there are fewer offices and the competition is more intense. Not exactly up-or-out, but I see what you mean. Especially in an honor-based society, no one wanted to be the perpetually junior senator.
But yes, you would not find the same person monopolizing a magistracy for 40 years.
So they can start acting like it. Your job is bigger than yourself now. You are the highest of public servant. The cost of money-motivated grifters and immense distrust from the public is far greater than the cost of losing a few people who would be good politicians but need to live lavishly.
Financial transparency above and beyond regular citizens, middle income, middle housing. That's a fair shake. How can you stay in touch with the average citizen when you have three lavish estates?
https://www.fineprintdata.com/post/pelosistocks
A recent example:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nancy-pelosi-buys-tesla-calls...
I mean, my kids have beaten the stock market over the last two years, largely for the same reason; I put some of their allowance into Tesla shares with them.