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Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

The fact that high-ranking politicians and bureaucrats can trade stocks at all is criminal. The moral hazard is unbelievable.

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Yes it's the definition of conflict of interest. It's insane that this is allowed

I think it's working as intended and that it's insane that people are surprised it's set up this way.

The state and large corporate interests in the USA are very tightly integrated and have been for at least an entire generation.

But this is so cynical. Not to be naive, but if we can't at least start from the framework that the government should serve primarily the interests of the people and be outraged when it doesn't, then the American project is pretty much over

I'm not sure that has ever been true, or ever been the goal.

The American government does serve the interests of the American people: the American people who own the bulk of the land and the largest companies.

George Washington was the largest landowner in the colonies when the revolution started.

But Washington also shocked the ruling elites of the world by stepping down when he did. Clearly, he was cut of a different cloth than other largest landowners in their respective countries.

Right, and in the very beginning, only some single-digit percent of the people living in the US were eligible to vote. Women, slaves, non-landowners, etc. did not have the right to vote.

The idea that the US was originally founded "by the people, for the people" is not at all what happened. I guess we could say that the government they created was progressive for its time, at least.

> Right, and in the very beginning, only some single-digit percent of the people living in the US were eligible to vote. Women, slaves, non-landowners, etc. did not have the right to vote.

Slaves would not have been a large proportion of the country as a whole--about 20% at their height. While the early US did require landownership for adult free males to vote, the US also had unusually high landownership rates. It's estimated that ~60% of free adult males had the right to vote (contemporary Britain had about 15-20% of free adult males having that same rate). So ultimately you end up with about 25% of the current franchise rate, or somewhere in the mid-high teens after taking into account the existence of children who still cannot vote.

The US was more democratic after the revolution than before. Since then the trend has been in that direction, largely because those kinds of principles are baked into the constitution.

When in the private sector those of us that even get a whiff of MNPI are told we can’t trade individual names at all.

If you work in private equity, it's the worst. Your company isn't actively trading stock, but you still get banned from options, shorts, and need pre-clearance for every single trade. So you end up long SPY... even if you derive independent utility from actively managing your portfolio.

The law doesn't require this of course, but basically all money managers get their insider trading compliance program from the same 3 outside law firms.

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