Should only the rich be allowed to take risks with their own money?
Either we get rid of welfare, or ban people from partaking in risky investments. Which do you think is better?
The rich don't get handouts when they fail, they get handouts the entire time they're succeeding. They pay 15% on capital gains while the rest of us pay 30% on income.
They'll pass a special tax cut for your one specific company. You can pay your workers the min wage, but not the living wage, and let everyone else (in the form of benefits) pick up the slack.
You can even get a handout for promising to create jobs or do stuff, and then never actually do it, or if you do 20% of it, blame the failure to deliver the complete promise on something hand-wavy.
But yeah the poor are the problem.
This argument taken to its logical conclusion leads to serfdom. You might even say it's The Road to Serfdom.
Investing in a high risk startup could theoretically be done for like $100 to buy .0001% if regulations encouraged this sort of thing.
It's the ease of access to things people don't understand and could lose all their money on that these regulations are meant to combat. I feel like your argument is very "assume spherical cow", but I take a more pragmatic "this is what would probably happen 99% of the time" approach to this.
And "either end welfare, or ban risky investments" is a nuanced study of the spectrum?
Not to mention that even if the companies aren't any more lucrative, they can still help the average investor reduce their portfolio risk via diversification. If the universe of public stocks shrinks, your portfolio is going to face greater volatility, even if your absolute returns remain constant. Diversification is the only free lunch out there.