Pelosi defends stock trading by lawmakers. ‘We are a free-market economy’ | Hacker News Reader

Pelosi defends stock trading by lawmakers. ‘We are a free-market economy’

marketwatch.com

605 pointstiahura507 comments

"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.

This is not a defense, it's a dismissal.

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.

How quickly do they have to report their investment activity? If it's not immediate, then no, anyone is not free to copy their moves.

Their moves are known ex post facto.

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.

Law makers are exempt because they made themselves exempt, simple as that.

Of course they are. I guess that's one of the few cases on which all law makers can agree. Doesn't mean they should be exempt.

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?

Absolutely not, we are talking about politicians here. I like the idea of divesting into index funds during time in parliament / service.

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.

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.

True, in advance would be better.

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

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.

Yes, that's why I said "not be able to undo it".

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.

You mean a day or two in advance? Or post trade? Post trade is not good, but pre trade should still be able to quell the insider advantage.

With today’s technology, I do not see why trades cannot be reported immediately.

"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"

because if you have to report it ahead of time, it neutralizes any advantage you might have from the insider information.

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.

These sort of things are like driving container ships, they're big, slow, and their moves are heavily telegraphed.

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.

> They do have to report their positions

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.

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.

similar situation here, I'm a dev for a major business news company. her comments are brazen at best.

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.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-details-on-visas-attempt-to...

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

> and you should feel ashamed for it

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)

> Power is given by the people.

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.

[0]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Hall_Putsch [1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933

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.

>She has the power to unilaterally end this practice and chooses not to.

Would such a restriction be constitutional?

How would it be enforced?

Who would investigate impropriety?

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.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_Committee_...

> 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.

> the person who, annually, sets rules on house procedure

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.

>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.

You chide someone while literally demonstrating sociopathic behavior. I dont think you are in the right.

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.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You guys are probably aware that what you end up with is a safe space for nazis.

Like free speech; the extreme are protected by the rules that protect us all. That's a good thing.

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

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.

To feel shame is an emotional reaction to violating standards of morality. If you have no morality, you have no shame.

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?

You've summarized a human pattern that I sort of intuitively guessed at, but didn't really synthesize and integrate.

All power seems to behave like this. Republicans, Democrats, Communists, corporate titans, office politickers.

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".

Yes, making society worse off, knowingly: that means harming others: yes, be ashamed.

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.

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?

You will probably score very high on this test: https://www.psychopathtest.com/

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.

Just a heads up.

It would be shameful if anyone felt shame anymore. We do live in a post-shame society.

Well, you're right.

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.

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?"

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.

Yes, it might limit this type of trading but the corruption will just be another type.

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.

The solution is the require everyone that holds high office to put all their investments in a blind trust when they take the oath of office.

Can you elaborate why term limits wouldn’t at least help the problem?

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.

I see, so basically people are greedy. Yet under that same predicate, wouldn’t the same greedy senator be worse in-perpetuity?

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.

Lots of already cynical people go into politics.

True dat

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"

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.

40 to 50 years is still greater than 15 though isn't it?

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.

> True, though the ratio of 15 to 45 is better than the ratio of 2 to 45.

Senate terms are 6 years, not 2.

Are we still talking about Pelosi? She’s not a Senator

> Are we still talking about Pelosi? She’s not a Senator

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.

Thanks for clarifying, it was a bit hard for me to follow on mobile

If Senators served 15 year terms, without limits...

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.

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:

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/democracy-for-realists-part...

> 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.

> You make it sound like that is a long 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.

Maybe I'm just cynical, but I tend to think of which party is in 'power' as just a proxy for which party gets the biggest bribes :-P

But tbh, if I had the answers, I'd run for govt :-D

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"?

Because one individual rep has limited power? This is a positive thing and not a negative

Pelosi is the Speaker, not some backbencher with one vote. She has enormous power, perhaps only second to the President.

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)

That implies what, though? That the people get the government they deserve due to their unwillingness to learn and vote people out of office?

Or they get the government they want, or they don't get the government that they don't want. The later seems more often to be the way people vote.

Gerrymandered districts and two party politics where the other guy is the worse guy conspires pretty well to make sure this never happens.

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.

Well, it'd certainly reduce the amount of time spent by politicians on getting re-elected.

Which could be a good thing. See the book "10% Less Democracy":

https://www.amazon.com/10-Less-Democracy-Should-Elites/dp/15...

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:

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/what-i-hope-to-prove

> 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.

Right now we get that with the huge advantage incumbents have over any challengers.

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:

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/democracy-for-realists-part...

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."

An excerpt from:

"Don't make a fetish of having flat organization"

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/dont-make-a-fetish-of-havin...

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.

> If we want good government, then we need civil servants who are willing to work their whole careers in government.

Working for a long time on a given problem may make one competent, but it doesn't make one good.

Is this based on real data, or is it just theoretical?

Electing Senators for life is essentially what we have now, and that seems to be working spectacularly.

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.

You can easily solve for that too:

- 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.

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.

I think many people don’t think “politician” should be a career option.

However, there are some states that don’t pay their legislators at all and that comes with its own problems.

How about a electoral system that isn't First Past the Post?

Give the voters the ability to pick more than two options.

And shameless given her rhetoric around the presidential emoluments clause, which is valid, but then apparently for Congress people this concern is dismissed…

Well, the former is literally in the Constitution and the later is not, so ...

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.

And the emoluments clause doesn't say POTUS cannot own interest in foreign companies. That is a creative re-interpretation invented in 2016.

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.

The emoluments clause is explicitly defined in the constitution

> I mean she's worth over $100 million...

I don't get it. Is it just sport at this point?

Once you're worth a certain amount the most sensible places to store your money are places that use it to generate more money.

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

>People need to realize politicians on both sides of the aisle sold them out to get rich

Yes, there are centrist neo-liberals in both parties. They don't want Bernie Sanders types or Donald Trump types to be elected.

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.

OK. San Francisco, the fourth largest city in California, can't be bothered not to elect this evil person. Happy?

A significant fraction of HN's readership resides in that district as well.

The rich city that can't even be bothered to deal with the shitty conditions that drove most of them to Uber everywhere?

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.

I think her husband has beat the s%P the last year, I"m not sure long term.

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.

Ah yes, CEOs are in charge of banning individual accounts

I'm not sure if you're joking but Jack Dorsey was absolutely the final decision maker in many high profile account bans

Irrelevant. Why did Twitter ban an account reporting objective details on a public figure's actions and/or corruption?

(The 3rd most powerful person in our elite ruling class, mind you)

They did ban Trump's account...

So have plenty of people?

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.

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 there evidence of this?

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 think her husband has beaten Warren Buffet by nearly double. No one is consistently that good.

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.

Yes. It's well known she's corrupt to the bone.

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.

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.

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.

> Have you seen the people who have primaried her?

“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.

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.

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 should give her a break. She is busy solving problems in her district.

I can see fat dripping from this post.

In a pure free market, trading by insiders is legal. It used to be that way in the US.

Also, keep in mind that regulation creates insiders of its own. Regulation always degenerates into a weapon of the corrupt.

Woah, I don't know about that. I like clean air regulations, clean water, and regulations against children working.

Without regulation we would have a real hellscape.

It turns out you can't trust "the market" to do the right thing - ever.

Do you disagree with something I said in my comment? I cannot see that you do.

Also, frankly, I don't appreciate the sass. It isn't necessary.

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.

In a pure free market, trading slaves and snake oil is legal. It used to be that way in the US.

That's not true. In a free market, the initiation of force is barred by the government, so there is no slavery.

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.

It's actually not. Any product making medical claims is regulated by the FTC under deceptive advertising. https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/statutes/federal-trade-commi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_oil

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.

"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.

> In a pure free market, trading by insiders is legal.

Not really. Why can't companies make "no insider trading" as a condition to employment?

They can.

Do you not understand the difference between a rule for employees, and the law?

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.

That idea about monopolies is part of the popular economic dogma, but I do not agree at all. In a free market, monopolies are tenuous at best.

Then why were they so frequent and massive prior to stricter regulations?

> This is not a defense, it's a dismissal.

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.

This is the law, and has been since 2012 [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STOCK_Act

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.

looks like we found nancy pelosi's hacker news account

> This is the law, and has been since 2012

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...

> It largely rendered the STOCK Act useless

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...

>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.

> making it impossible to query the records in a useful way even onsite

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 a nice idea, but how do you out legislate a legislator? Has that ever worked out before in history?

of course it's been done. everyone has a price or a fear.

> 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.

In capitalism, if you have money you can get power.

In socialism, if you have power you can get money.

I guess in a mixed economy, it flows both ways.

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.

This is Nancy Pelosi saying "Members of congress make lots of money that way, and we like money, so we're not going to stop making money."

Like most of government, they won't take their hand out of the cash drawer until someone threatens to put cuffs on it.

Yes, we are a free-market. But there are people, like company executives (and high-ranking politicians) who have non-public information that does not belong to them. When congress uses insider knowledge, they are stealing from the ameria, and undermining any semblance of policy integrity.

And for that reason, the SEC has 10b-5 plans, which can certainly be critiqued, but at least removes the low-hanging fruit like "we are getting acquired so I'll buy as many shares and out of the money options as I can".

Iirc her husband was basically buying fairly far-out (~16-18 months) calls at the onset of the pandemic, and they were expiring around the time of, was it an antitrust hearing? The timing itself was poor, but the expiration didn't seem diabolical.

But it was just like, c'mon, I don't even like the anti-trust bent congress is on, but how are you thinking people are taking your goals in good faith when you have any explicit (and intrinsically timed) personal interest in not harming the businesses you are looking into anti-trust action against?

The Fed trading ethics thing with Kaplan and Rosengren was also pretty bad. But imo, they made real changes. They restricted a lot of individual trading, and anything they can still trade in, has to be requested 45 days in advance. I think they understood the gravity of what that said about them, and took real steps to remedy.

The STOCK Act otoh says Congress and employees have to report within 45 days...

> STOCK Act otoh says Congress and employees have to report within 45 days

Why does advance disclosure prevent insider trading differently from post-trade disclosure? Both permit similar forms of enforcement.

In an era of HFT, 45 days might as well be 10 years.

> an era of HFT, 45 days might as well be 10 years

Sorry, I thought the problem was corruption. Not market makers getting run over. If it’s the former, the delay is irrelevant. If it’s the latter…why?

Advance disclosure prevents insider trading because it makes it unprofitable. If everyone knows you have insider information and what your sales plan is, it's no longer insider information because your sales plan telegraphs what you know, and now everyone else can trade on that information too.

The argument is like jedberg describes, if you have to disclose your trades far ahead of time, does having inside information matter? Make them plan far enough ahead that it's ineffective.

To me, the thing you are trying to curb is the short latency. You don't want, let's say...the head of the senate intelligence committee talking about how prepared america is for pandemics, and then turning around and selling a bunch equities. Or, calling his brother in law for less than a minute, directly after which he calls his broker.

Imo, it's the difference between, "disclose your plans, providing an opportunity for questions and looking for ethical red flags" and, "seeing the transactions after the fact, after which the people always say, 'nah, nah my guy, you got it all wrong, I already planned to make these trades, or it had nothing to do with the non-public information I had access to ;)"

> Yes, we are a free-market

Honestly - no we (America) are not. A free market would have:

- Let all of the major banks fail

- No (or limited) Federal Reserve

- Disallowed the various regulatory capture (Foxconn's building in WI, Intuit's stronghold on pay taxes, etc. etc.)

- AT&T wouldn't have been broken up

- etc. etc.

Also, various industries would never be subsidised; automotive production in the US would have disappeared decades ago in a truly free market.

It might have been re-organized with a different cost-structure and different product portfolio, though I agree that the 'big three' would not exist in their current form.

I agree that we don't have a free market, but how do you get to "AT&T wouldn't have been broken up" as evidence of that? It's exactly the opposite.

In this hypothetical laissez-faire USA, AT&T would not have been granted a monopoly to begin with (what allowed the company to metastasize into Ma Bell) in addition to not having been broken up so long as any monopoly AT&T achieved (or failed to achieve) was accomplished on its own merits. Thus the previous post is technically correct about the outcome, but probably for the wrong reasons (i.e. failing to account that Ma Bell itself was not a product of the free market)

I'm the parent - I agreed with pretty much everything you said.

A free market would also have: - Child labor - Terrible workplace safety (see steel mills in the 1800s) - Polluted rivers - Monopolistic companies that buy up competition

For the last point : Facebook bought all the potential Facebook replacements

When I worked for a finance adjacent firm, not even a firm that handled money, my compliance policy was super strict even by industry standards and I was a lowly Sr. SWE. The reasoning I was given was to not never even provide a hint of impropriety or using data ahead of our customers. Reputation was everything.

The blanket company-wide policy was as follows. Certain departments had rules on top of this.

1. Limited to general stocks, ETFs, mutual funds, etc. No derivatives allowed (options, etc.). Even private stock or private options from my prior require required a review from compliance when I started. 2. No selling for a gain within 30 days of the purchase date on ANY security. Selling for a loss was allowed at any time. 3. All brokerage accounts had to be linked to their compliance portal. An automated compliance check pulled your statements weekly and would open a ticket with compliance if anything looked to violate policy. If your brokerage was not supported electronically, you had to submit monthly paper statements.

I don't see why Congress shouldn't be subject to similar rules, especially those on finance committees.

Limiting Congress and staff to ETFs and mutual funds seems reasonable.

On the right committees I think you could probably do pretty well knowing when to buy SPY puts.

>The reasoning I was given was to not never even provide a hint of impropriety or using data ahead of our customers. Reputation was everything.

One bit I took away from grad school was the strict standards around conflicts of interest. The big concept was "Disclose and avoid conflicts of interest and the appearance of impropriety." The avoidance of impropriety is a much higher standard, and unfortunately it's all too common to see that standard not applied in government.

"Rules for thee, not for me" mentality.

there is no need for common sense rules if you have a working highly competitive democracy

Any politician would know that doing anything that can be interpreted as a shady buisness would end their political career for good.

Like that time Joe Biden stole autobiographycal speech from British politician. It ended his campaign at the time, but had little to no effect on his career overall

This makes so much sense to me. I had a similar experience at Goldman, and I had a friend who worked there who got called by compliance at the bank he worked at, because his financial adviser had bought a stock he wasn't allowed to. I think it's wild that our government isn't held to the same standard.

At this point, the country is run by a gerontocracy, and they are blatantly grasping at the last scraps of their grift as the ship goes down. It's sad to see -- really pathetic.

It's amazing these people keep getting voted back in too.

Your plane will likely crash if you don't toe the line.

edit: Tow => toe

the phrase is "toe the line"

oof. thank you lol.

> It's amazing these people keep getting voted back in too.

It's a two-party system, you have to vote for one of them!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuYsZUMuj0M, The Simpsons S8E1 - Treehouse of Horror VII - Kang and Kodos

Or more accurately, they've gotten really good at getting people to focus on hating the other guy or getting wrapped up in partisan BS.

The problem is that we do not have effective third parties, because

* elections in the US require a fuckton of spending. AOC raised millions for a House district that wasn't even competitive, meanwhile the British Parliament has a 30,000GBP spending limit. It is a lot easier for upstart parties to raise tens of thousands of dollars rather than millions.

* third parties in the US have a habit of mostly trying to go for broke and failing. The general track record of successful ones elsewhere is that they usually cut their teeth in lower levels of government before they start competing well in national elections, and on top of that the lower level elections are generally easier to win (much lower voter count = much lower spending, thinner electoral margins, etc.)

* the US lacks regional parties, which is another source of third-partyism, but depending on your views this might be a good thing.

No mention of FPTP voting system?

You can have third parties under FPTP. The UK, Canada, India to name a few have them.

So does the US, they even occasional win elections, even to Congress (historically, there is at least one case where one displaced a major national party in the state-level duopoly), that doesn't mean FPTP doesn't tend toward duopoly. (FPTP plus a strong Presidential system tends more strongly toward duopoly; FPTP plus a strong Presidential system plus an indirectly-elected President where Presidential electors are mostly elected by multimember FPTP tends even more strongly to duopoly.)

Isn't it more of a property of single-member districts rather than voting system?

No, multimember FPTP districts would be the same but worse (that's pretty much what most states use for Presidential electors, though), whereas you could construct a single-member district system with an electoral system producing proportionality and supporting multiple parties (though it would probably be ugly to administer) [0] which would not have the same problem (though it might have all kinds of other problems). It's a absolutely an FPTP problem, though most reasonable solutions also involve multimember districts.

[0] for an example of the top of my head: vote as in single-member FPTP, determine the proportion of first place votes globally by party to determine how many seats each party must win, and then globally order candidates from each party entitled to at least one seat in descending order of their vote share in their district. Starting with the party with the candidate with lowest maximum vote share, assign that candidate as the winner from their district, removing all other candidates from that district and dropping the party from further consideration if it has been assigned the number of seats it is entitled to; proceed until all seats are assigned.

> determine the proportion of first place votes globally

This sounds to me like artificially creating an election-wide multi-member district. I don't think it's standard to allow votes outside of a particular voting district to affect the results in that voting district.

I'm not claiming that making districts multi-member is a solution (as you mention, multi-member, winner-takes-all districts are also bad), just that it is a necessary condition to arrive at results that are closer to representing the choice of the voters.

Edit: apologies if this feels like moving the goal-post. I need to think a bit more about what could happen for example in single-member voting district with ranked-choice voting system - I think it would not lead to a 2-party system, so you're right here and changing the voting system may be sufficient.

> This sounds to me like artificially creating an election-wide multi-member district

I can see that.

> I'm not claiming that making districts multi-member is a solution (as you mention, multi-member, winner-takes-all districts are also bad), just that it is a necessary condition to arrive at results that are closer to representing the choice of the voters.

Ranked choice methods with single-member districts can slightly mitigate some of the problems, but yes, I’d agree that realistic solutions that do more than nip around the edges require multimember districts.

It's amazing that we don't have a middle ground party. The compromise between left and right since they can't compromise on their own.

A lot of people would argue that they're both middle ground parties that pretend to have big differences for the show of it.

> A lot of people would argue that they're both middle ground parties that pretend to have big differences for the show of it.

Even though a lot of people argue that, if it weren't true things would be far worse. Despite the differences, there needs to be something resembling a governing consensus.

Absolutely amazing you can look at the state of American politics and think "what we need here is more centrism".

We do have centrist parties in general elections. The non-centrist tendencies arise in the primaries. Then the non-centrist primary voters get miffed after the general election on account of the centrist lurch to collect independent votes.

Most Democrats are right of center on the political spectrum. (IMO)

Does the 30kGBP limit include money that other people spend on you? If not, that sounds like a way to guarantee that big third parties (who can write checks independently of the campaign to support their candidates) will always be able to outspend grassroots donations organized by the campaign.

3rd parties are actually subject to stricter spending rules: https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/sites/default/files/p...

(30K GBP is an average, since consitutencies in the UK have variations in population size. Constituencies do not get regularly recalculated unlike Congress redistricting every decade.)

> * the US lacks regional parties, which is another source of third-partyism, but depending on your views this might be a good thing.

IIRC, for a lot time the two major US parties were effectively federations of different regional parties (e.g. your farm-state Democrat had a very different set of positions that your northeastern urban Democrat, ditto for Republicans). That's collapsed in the last 20 years, and everything's basically national, which is a big part of the problem.

The lack of 3rd parties is not a function of spending - it's due to one-winner voting. With only one winner in each election, voters who would prefer a 3rd, 4th, or 5th place candidate quickly figure out that this is a waste of time and they had better line up behind one of the top two. This is how the US does end up with a small handful of 3rd party candidates here and there - because there were enough concentration of voters in their (usually small) district to make them the top candidate in that district. Very hard for smaller parties to have this level of concentrated support over any medium or large area.

An alternative voting system might have voting for many offices together, with many winners. In that case the winners can be distributed among the various voter preferences proportionally. Some countries already do this and therefore have reasonably robust multi-party systems - though I don't think it's at all clear that this is better at serving the needs of the public.

Eh, third parties are plenty viable in the FPTP UK, Canada and India.

It's just a feature of US politics that movements like the Tea Party or DSA decide to shake things within existing parties rather than launch new ones. Even the new ones that launch like the Working Families Party often just support two-party candidates.

I'm not from the UK, but CGP grey is AFAIK. He has a short video called "Why the UK Election Results are the Worst in History" (2015). IMO, it seems like First Past the Post voting is the problem still.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=r9rGX91rq5I

I mean, there's also only one winner in French presidential and national assembly elections, and we have a lot more than two big parties.

You can vote for someone else in the primaries though, can't you?

How would that help?

Open primaries would permit centrist voters to 'shave off' what they see as fringe positions prior to the general election.

If you didn't vote for a lizard, the wrong lizard might get in!

How many times are we going to fall for `This is the most important election of our lives!`. It's always about choosing the lesser evil. Every time. And then nothing changes.

Andrew Yang has the right idea. We need to break the duopoly by implementing Ranked-Choice Voting and Nonpartisan Primaries.

>> How many times are we going to fall for `This is the most important election of our lives!`. It's always about choosing the lesser evil. Every time. And then nothing changes.

> Andrew Yang has the right idea. We need to break the duopoly by implementing Ranked-Choice Voting and Nonpartisan Primaries.

Those sound like a technical solutions to a social problem.

Why can’t technical solutions help to simplify/ease the social problem? It’s clearly not the only thing required, but it would provide some major relief.

> Why can’t technical solutions help to simplify/ease the social problem? It’s clearly not the only thing required, but it would provide some major relief.

They can be part of a more holistic solution, but here they were presented as the solution. And if you only have half a solution, it may turn out to be half of the wrong one.

“It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..."

"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"

"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."

"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."

"I did," said Ford. "It is."

"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't people get rid of the lizards?"

"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."

"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"

"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."

"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"

"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"

It's actually a one party system with two divisions, as their voting record shows. [1].

[1] https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...

If I have a choice between someone who used insider trading to make money and someone who lied about election fraud, a direct attack on democracy, I choose the least evil (or best of) the two people. I wish there was a third party system.

The fact that you felt compelled to say what you just did (which is patently absurd) is why our democracy is failing.

It's the same old problem. Everyone hates Congress, but loves their own Congressman. And tribal politics being what it is, nobody wants to throw away their vote on a third-party because they're worried that will cause The Other Side to win.

I mean that's literally true though. Every election in the foreseeable future will pretty much always be won by one of the two parties. As the parent comment points out they've got millions of dollars put in to generating tons of outreach. Do you honestly believe an internet comment is comparable?

Most people vote against the other other guys. I don't think anybody really wants Pelosi or Biden but they just look at the alternatives. It's a sad state of affairs that you can only choose between two bad choices.

gerontocracy: Government based on rule by elders.

What's wrong with a gerontocracy and how does that relate in any way to stock trading?

Folks who are over 60 years of age should not be making and setting rules for an entire country to follow. When you're that old, you're stuck in the past and the laws don't move forward with the public. Think of how many times you've to explain to your grandparents how "things are different now".

A gerontocracy doesn't directly relate to stock trading, but this old woman is saying very absurd things.

This is ageism, folks.

This descriptor is idiotic, although the assumption that 30 year old senators would fare better on corruption accounts is as well.

I agree. I am in my 50s and I can barely relate to the world my younger colleagues in their 20s live in. I can't even imagine how far people in their 70s and 80s are removed from the reality of younger people. They shouldn't make any decisions for the future of a country.

Just wait...the geriatrics will die soon enough as they necessarily do, and then all of the resources they've squirreled away will be inherited by their heirs who have even fewer scruples or talents than their parents.

I agree with Pelosi that congress members should not be excluded from participating in the stock market.

HOWEVER, they should have to follow the same rules as C-level execs at public companies, except for every company. They should be required to file a sales plan in advance of any sales, and far enough in advance that any investor can front-run them. Then they can trade on insider information all they want, just like CEOs, because it won't matter.

This would basically force them to trade long on companies they truly believe in, just like CEOs have to do.

True, although that wouldn't help in this special case when they pump cash into companies they planned to invest into. Fair investment rules are one thing but tax payers get shafted in favor of those who trade. Taxes should not provide a casino.

> I agree with Pelosi that congress members should not be excluded from participating in the stock market.

I disagree completely. They have access to a lot more information that affects the entire market. There are only hundreds of members of Congress and they are payed well and have great benefits. It's not like they're being repressed. What benefit is there to them trading stocks?

> This would basically force them to trade long on companies they truly believe in, just like CEOs have to do.

Sure, this would prevent them from getting a quick buck but what's going to stop them for being biased with the companies they are long in.

There was a Twitter account which tracked Pelosi and her husband's stock trades which has since been banned. [1]

[1] https://www.theblaze.com/news/twitter-bans-popular-accounts-... (Apologies for the tabloidy source)

Where can I keep track of lawmaker stock market trades now?

IIRC Quiver Quant does that for you.

There are a few sites. For example: https://www.quiverquant.com/sources/senatetrading

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.

Define family member. Also, everyone in the US is already subject to insider trading regulations.

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.

[1]https://www.sec.gov/rules/final/ia-2256.htm#P72_13634

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.

If that's the case then I would just tell my friend insider information that helps him then wait for him to tell me info as well.

And I can steal my neighbour's bike from the common bike room, both could land you in jail if it's ever discovered.

This is not some kind lf 'goctcha, i am so smart', all accountants, bank employees and traders are subject to these industry-standard restrictions.

Not quite true.

Congress has been explicitly exempted from insider trading regulations.

As far as I know, this was rectified in 2012 (or at least made explicit, some claim Congress was never exempt).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STOCK_Act

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970203711104577199...

https://www.congressionalinstitute.org/2018/08/16/can-member...

Would you consider leverage restrictions? A well placed SPY call option can still capture plenty of inside information at a congress level

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.

> Shouldn't be that hard to solve

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.

It's a solved problem in Canada. Everything goes into a Blind Trust.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/pei-blin...

As long as people like her are powerful we are not. The US has long stopped being a free market. Too big to fail guaranteed 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.

> I put my point far too weakly

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!

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"

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.

It’s a crime for corporate insiders under certain circumstances. What she’s doing is perfectly legal, even if clearly immoral.

Insider trading has been illegal for congressmen and women for almost ten years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STOCK_Act

I stand corrected. Now let’s hope they enforce the Stock Act.

"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.

I'm quoting Matt Levine, who is in turn summarizing the state of US law. That's not my personal philosophy, ftr

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.

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...

The entire basis of US Federal Securities Laws is the concept of "full and fair disclosure".

1. source?

2. that sounds more applicable to sellers of securities (ie. "you can't hide stuff in your quarterly statements") than insider trading.

Go look at the SEC’s mission statement and the full name of the ‘33 Act and ‘34 Act.

>SEC’s mission statement

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.

Yes. My mistake. I don’t know anything about federal securities laws. Thank you for explaining it to me. There’s always an expert on HN!

You're making a very serious allegation, that a politician has been using insider trading to make money on the stock market.

Do you have any evidence of this, or are you repeating something you read on Reddit/Twitter/Facebook etc?

I'm not aware of any direct evidence, but I think there's plenty of indirect evidence that should prompt an investigation.

Senators dumping stocks prior to the pandemic shutdowns, for example.

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/488593-four-senators-sol...

Do you think that people should be calling for the death of a politician based on "indirect evidence"?

Personally I'm against the death penalty, so I don't think we should listen to people that call for any ones death, for any reason.

Reading between the lines, however, I do think people have a right to be upset due to indirect evidence.

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.

Based off of your tone I can't tell if you're trolling or not, but I'm going to give your comment the benefit of the doubt.

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.

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?

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.

I'd have no issue with it at all if they simply followed basic industry standard regulation. Employees of investment companies usually need to adhere to something like this:

- Need pre-clearance to trade in a share or ETF, sometimes mutual funds

- Once pre-clearance granted, need to trade within a short window of time (say 24hrs)

- Minimum holding time of 30 days

- Ban on trading any assets/industries that you have close connection to

- Regular disclosures of investment portfolio

Sure you may find a market for internal tip-offs, but (1) that's already a bit harder, (2) there's a clear record of not only trading, but also intentions, and (3) the minimum holding period makes insider trading less attractive. So a fellow senator gives you a tip that a company might go up 5%. OK, but that's a short-term thing, usually, what's going to happen over 30 days is less clear.

Plus covering everyone in the same household.

Lots of confusion in this thread. Members of Congress cannot legally trade on insider information, and haven’t been able to since 2012 [1].

The law was amended in 2013 to limit public disclosure by some tens of thousands of senior government officials. But it did not remove the non-public information trading restrictions from anyone. And it retained the full force of the STOCK Act for members of Congress.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STOCK_Act

The joke "someone's trying to kill you? Don't be ridiculous, that's illegal" comes to mind. "Corruption" by any rational standard is largely legalized in the US, and even where it is prohibited, it is not enforced. For example, the 2020 congressional insider trading scandal.

I think she should simply resign at this point.

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.

Just her? Not every other lawmaker?

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.

We put term limits on the Presidential branch, I see no reason why we shouldn't limit the terms someone in congress can serve, and for the same reasons.

If we have a free market, why did we pass the 1978 Ethics in Government Act, which put forth that all high-ranking federal officials are required to disclose their financial holdings and recuse themselves from any government business in which they, their families or close associates have a financial interest? All federal officials, that is, except the president, the vice president, members of Congress and federal judges?[1]

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/202

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.

Also in Turkey and Argentina.

This is one of the top stories on Reddit.

Some of the top comments on the Reddit story are calling for her death. No moderation. No dissent.

Reddit is going to get HAMMERED once it goes public.

For ref: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/rh7anj/pelosi_rej...

I don't quite understand your comment.

You seem upset at the sight of the unwashed masses hollering against the haughty elites, but at the same time you sound gleeful over the prospect of Reddit being punished for insufficiently protecting the feelings of said elite.

Is that a correct reading?

A top comment on one of the most popular websites in the world is calling for the death of a politician based on no evidence whatsoever. Perhaps this is normal to you, but not to me, or any of the advertisers who pay money to advertise on Reddit.

If you think that it's normal to call for the death of a politician based on no evidence of a crime, then perhaps other lower-quality websites may be a better fit for you, rather than Hacker News?

It's normal in that Reddit has been like this for some time? It's not like this is new information for investors or advertisers.

> A top comment on one of the most popular websites in the world

You could just as easily be describing YouTube or Instagram comments, which regularly feature humanity at its worst and dumbest. Why would you expect Reddit to be any better, when it has millions of users?

Your second sentence is pure trolling and I will turn the same question over to you. Pointless, sanctimonious outrage doesn't belong on Hacker News.

That assumes they're not correct

Some subreddits were banned for such comments. Will reddit ban r/politics ? (I know the answer)

Hell, /r/chapotraphouse was banned for allowing members to call for the death of 19th century slave owners. Sitewide rule enforcement on R*ddit is pretty arbitrary and at the convenience of the admins.

That's not why chapotraphouse was banned. You can still find tons of links on shitredditsays pointing out members of that sub calling for the death of still-living people, or entire races of people. For example, see the not-very-subtly coded references to baseball, referring to the assassination of Scalise.

I don't really wish her death but I definitely would like old people like Biden, Pelosi and Clinton go away and not f..k up the country even more. Hopefully they will go away before they die but I am not so sure they have the sense to retire.

Nancy Pelosi has done orders of magnitude more harm to our country than many people that have been given the death penalty.

I don't wish for her death, but I certainly think we'd be better off if she was no longer in power. Additionally the lack of consequences for her corruption harms public trust in our electoral system.

> 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.

That's 86th percentile for US household income. They can make do. Welcome to public service.

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.

Yes, there's always excuses to "need" higher pay.

86th percentile is more than sufficient for representatives of the people.

If you view public service as requiring sacrifice, perhaps, but if you wish to attract folks you need to at least bring decent pay to the table.

And the second household is necessarily in one of the more expensive real estate markets in the country.

salaries havent gone up because they've opted to decline the increase for themselves.

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.

> 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

I kinda like that idea; a little Versailles-y.

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.

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?

On the sell side, you and your spouse are heavily regulated so that neither can hold individual stocks, can’t touch anything where you may possibly have material non public info, have mandatory holding periods, and any mutual funds or ETFs must be sufficiently diversified. And that’s only part of the trading regulations and requirements. I can’t even buy a Dow Jones tracking ETF. The fact that Pelosi and the rest of congress can trade ahead of their own decisions is laughably corrupt. Make them have the same kinds of trading requirements a 1st year banker has.

> On the sell side, you and your spouse are heavily regulated so that neither can hold individual stocks

This is not uniformly true. There are various blackouts and pre-clearance requirements and monitoring. But not every bank bans individual stock trading.

All of the large investment banks do at this point as far as I am aware. The core point I aim to make, however, is that it’s hilariously unfair that a 22 year old PowerPoint monkey with relatively little knowledge and almost no market influence has infinitely more conflict of interest oversight than members of congress.

> infinitely more conflict of interest oversight than members of congress

Last I checked, their every trade isn’t made public in an online database.

That’s a fair point. Banker’s monitored trades and accounts are on record internally and usually tracked by their firm’s surveillance software. Not public though thankfully.

Fun fact: Nancy Pelosi beats the stock market. She does very well in options trading.

https://www.fineprintdata.com/post/pelosistocks

A recent example:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nancy-pelosi-buys-tesla-calls...

> 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.

Are your kids trading options?

We're not quite there on the financial education, but they're certainly benefiting from Tesla's rise.

There was a quip about this along the lines of legislators playing the market was like letting referees make bets on their own games, even while they were being played.

In the case of legislators, it's something to tolerate until it gets out of hand, but when their returns are better than professional hedge funds, it undermines the legitimacy of the institution they're employed to operate on our behalf.

Sure, but if the regulators of that economy have a built in conflict of interest then that free market can't be sustained for long.

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.

It seems so obvious.

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.

Both Facebook and Google have these restrictions for every single employee.

So this is a restriction from the company itself, then, not a law?

I believe the law itself is sufficiently vaguely worded that the companies have opted for a blanket policy to avoid even a hint of impropriety.

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.

The post-Watergate Ethics In Government Act [1] requires blind trusts for certain executive officials. It should apply to Congress as well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_in_Government_Act

A number of people in this conversation are fixated on the idea that advanced disclosure allows the market to front-run the congressperson and therefore remove the advantage of inside information.

But this still allows lawmakers the other corrupt path of trying to pick policies which benefit the companies or sectors in which they have holdings. Might there be federal efforts to ease housing shortages if members of congress didn't have investment properties?

I think for politicians above a certain level, we should go full Rawls. When you leave office, a random citizen from your constituency is selected, your net worth is set to their current net worth, and for a period of k years after leaving office, your income is funded by the public to match the income of that constituent.

> I think for politicians above a certain level, we should go full Rawls. When you leave office, a random citizen from your constituency is selected, your net worth is set to their current net worth, and for a period of k years after leaving office, your income is funded by the public to match the income of that constituent.

This is a novel idea to me. Are you referring to https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rawls/? If so, could you elaborate a bit on the philosophical underpinnings of this idea? My meager googling did not raise anything substantive.

Rawls wrote a bunch of stuff about fairness and justice, and I won't pretend to have read it all. But one idea he discussed is imagining oneself behind a "veil of ignorance" that conceals the particulars of one's attributes, circumstances, etc. In considering how society is structured, how resources are distributed, what the laws are etc, we should do so without attachment to our own individual utility.

So imagine a universe where we were all thinking, rational, disembodied souls before we were born, and as disembodied souls we could debate and together choose how the society we're born into would work -- but we don't individually get to choose who we will be born as. You don't get to know what your race, your gender, your family's income, class, region, etc. How would you want society to be structured? What would you want laws and norms to look like? etc.

My claim is roughly that the way to incentivize leaders to actually work for the wellbeing of their constituents is to artificially construct and impose such a veil of ignorance, so that leaders are pushed to improve the wellbeing of as many as possible.

If you work at an investment bank or hedge fund you typically have to apply for approval before trading personally (or someone connected to you like a spouse or partner). That applies for each and every trade you make. This is not an unfair request to make of your employees because it limits potential insider trading as well as conflict of interest trades. Not to mention the unfair advantage an employee could have by using expensive data feeds from the bank.

Banks and funds have compliance departments which track which companies are clients/positions. You _might_ create a similar apparatus for Congress, but tracking which companies are subject to a particular law would be complicated and error-prone.

Better to limit them to general positions like ETFs and mutual funds, as others have suggested.

Yes, I like that. EFTs, disconnected. Awesome.

The insidious thing about allowing congress to insider trade is that it creates a loophole to bypass campaign finance laws and enables corruption.

It would be illegal for a company to pay $1M to Pelosi in a quid pro quo.

It's legal for a company to give a stock tip worth $1m to Pelosi as gratuity for favorable legislation.

Pelosi doesn't want to remove this mechanism because it's how she solicits bribes and has consolidated her power.

Is there any published evidence of Pelosi accepting bribes, or are you posting stuff you read on Reddit and Facebook? Hacker News generally has a higher level of discourse, it's not really a conspiracy/Qanon type website.

The Pelosi's net worth has been consistently outperforming the market for decades.

I think it it pretty naive to assume that's due to her husband being a great trader/very lucky - she's passing information to him for their financial benefit.

What I think very annoying in Pelosi is that for all practical purposes she, like the Bushes, embodies the very real existence of a hereditary American Bureaucracy. Politicians grooming their offspring to follow their footsteps should be considered morally wrong. There shouldn’t even need to be a law against it, it should be considered a taboo like incest.

There is a reason Twitter deleted the NancyTracker twitter account. This was one of the only few blogs I could find which explains what happened: https://reclaimthenet.org/twitter-bans-nancy-pelosi-stock-tr...

Employees of many companies, especially financial companies, are subject to obnoxious restrictions on trading to protect their employers and their employers' customers from insider trading and front running.

Congress? They can do what they want w/o any restrictions? When their actions can and do move markets?? That's nuts.

Not sure if these family connections of Pelosi are widely known : https://calmatters.org/commentary/2019/01/gavin-newsoms-keep...

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.

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.

Wouldn't this mean that it is NOT a free market? If she is somehow privy to information that I'm not and laws don't seem to be able to touch politicians, then I just don't see how this can be a free market.

We are a free-market economy. But the free market assumptions are not just allowing for voluntary trades, but also require information symmetry. When one person (or group) has more information, we no longer have a free market.

Is it reasonable to request lawmakers to not trade stocks simply because they are in a position to affect stocks? If we do disallow lawmakers from trading, won't that act as a disincentive to some possibly good politicians who also happen to be using the market?

Currently members already have to report their positions in advance so it's very unlikely any congress member is actively trying to manipulate the market for their own benefit (it seems like in that case you'd just quit congress and be a successful business person?)

Congress should be able to own broad indexes and trade them very slowly. They shouldn't be allowed to buy huge options on companies based on nonpublic information.

This is so dumb. She is missing the whole point of whey folks are upset. Republican colleagues are making millions trading on information they know before the rest of us. And she's not immune. Her family has been documented making a mint from the markets. She should just put all her money in index funds and win and lose like the rest of the invested country. And her making such statements makes her and the dems no different than the republicans and that will hurt them at the polls but like she cares.

The wellness of the nation is not the same as the wellness of the markets and it seems clear that leaders should be getting rewarded for one and not the other or a major incentive misalignment exists. Maybe it's time to not just prevent them from trading stocks, probably for a good while after they leave office too, but to also tie their retirement benefits to things like future literacy rates, poverty rates, and other general indicators of national wellness.

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.

Two things can be true at once, yes it's a free-market economy and yes profiting from insider knowledge, especially as a lawmaker, should land you in jail.

Free market requires free access to information, congress members by design get access to information that is not available to the rest of the “free” market. So congressional access to the free market is a violation of the entire concept.

Either all market relevant information that Congress receives is made completely available to public at the same time as to Congress or Congress cannot have access to the market.

That they can trade individual equities is absolutely ridiculous. I feel that they shouldn't even be able to trade ETF's or mutual funds.

What if there was a congressional index fund where ordinary people could invest in the same basket of trades that congressmen/women are making.

Having congress not trade stocks does not inhibit the free market economy. In facts it makes it even more free by not allowing people in government with inside information to make money off of and manipulate the market to their liking. I've said it on so many of my other comments but no member of congress should be allowed to trade securities(or their immediate family members).

Maybe a solution is they have to notify the public a few days before a trade. Pelosi to sell X shares of XYZ company at a price $Z or above.

Many people here are complaining, but i also think that's why they let the companies go without much regulation.

Just enforce them to enclose their stock purchases the same day and make it illegal to trade based on knowledge like insiders.

If they trade in insider information, this will be known when laws are made. Normally records are available of many things.

No, the world is not perfect.

If Rand Paul were saying this nobody would care. But coming from her it reeks of "rules for thee but not for me".

The issue here is the futile attempt to tease apart power and money.

Those with power, seek to acquire money for when they lose power. Those with money, seek to acquire power for when they lose money.

If consultants at large firms are prohibited from trading specific shares, it does not make sense for folks who literally make the law to do so.

And who is going to draft a law preventing lawmakers from trading stock? Generally, lawmakers have some kind of immunity to prevent conflicts of interest like these.

But for the same reason the usual laws don't apply to them, the usual "free market economy" shouldn't either. But who is going to stop them?

Top beneficiary of policy defends it. More news at 11.

Unusual whales has done some fun analysis of this. Given the data, Pelosi’s position is almost uniquely unsurprising.

https://unusualwhales.com/i_am_the_senate/congress

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.

> enforcing an up-or-out mentality

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.

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).

Really makes you wonder what kind of utopia we'd be in if politicians acted fully in good faith.

You are a civil servant, why are expecting outsized profit from running our country? Our current political climate attracts folks who are excited to become wealthy and famous from running our country, when we should want people who are excited to run our country.

First, the claim that we are a “free market economy” is factually inaccurate; a free market is an unrealizable idealized analytical abstraction. We are not such an economy.

Second, it is particularly egregious for someone in a leadership position in the legislature which engages in the substantial regulation of the economy which makes it not a free market to make that claim, especially to defend their own (and others similarly situated) ability to act as simultaneous market regulators and participants.

Members of Congress should not be permitted to trade stocks personally; they should be required to (as Presidents before Trump for quite a while traditionally have, but have not been—though they should also be—required to) place assets in a blind trust during their tenure in office.

I might be able to accept them being allowed to trade personally on one condition: each who wants to do must establish a fund for that purpose, in which any American citizen is free to invest (and liquidate a position in) at any time, with all transaction and administrative costs covered by the fund.

Saw this comment on Reddit, but why doesn't Vanguard or Fidelity create an index fund that tracks these traded commodities? If the information is truly valuable, then it would make sense to package it up and sell it.

'When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.'

Quote from Frederic Bastiat...

"Pelosi has long said she has no involvement in or prior knowledge of her husband’s trading decisions and does not own any stock herself."

But does share information from her official duties with him?

People of California, what do you see in her.?.?.? Why keep electing?

Having an outstanding interest in companies creates a conflict of interest: if you have 10 million in calls on Facebook you might think twice before blocking a Facebook acquisition.

Cool !! So now she can free CEOs and billionaires from having to disclose their sales and bring them down to the congressional standard.

I hate hypocrites - regardless of their party affiliation.

They shouldn’t exactly because it’s a free market.

Oh, I see… a free market economy is good when it benefits the aristocrats, bad when it can be used for political talking points to garner votes. Got it.

Pelosi is vile, not only in her conduct but what she represents. The sooner she leaves office the better off we all are.

We are /NOT/ a free-market economy.

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.

Which countries would you consider being closest to 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.

Standard leftie: all for sharing, especially other people's money, but the buck stops at her money.

With perks like this, there is no doubt that some would be willing to cheat and lie to remain in power.

Democrats, as usually, seem uninterested in doing much or holding onto what power they've got.

Pelosi's criticisms of Trump's egregious financial abuse of power in the office of the President of the United State looks a lot more hollow now.

I don't think they look hollow, there was financial abuse. The media narratives made it look like he was the only one which is blatantly false. Both Republicans and Democrats are crooks who have different agendas but share the same destructive traits.

Having insiders with information not available to the market is not a free market.

We still have tariffs on steel, right? Corn subsidies? The USDA Market Facilitation Program? Bailouts for corporations too big to fail? Welfare labeled "stimulus"?

Maybe she means something else by "free-market".

I agree we are a free-market economy. This means Pelosi has a mandate to eliminate all taxes, tariffs, subsidies, and business regulations as they distort the free market. Practice what you preach.

It's ironic how Pelosi uses free markets to justify her own slimy trading activities, while simultaneously pushing legislation that would shift us more towards a socialist economy. That takes real chutzpah.

This is Pelosi’s “and yet she persisted”.

Tell that to Martha Stewart.

They're just unrepentent criminals at this point.

But they aren't. They aren't breaking the law. Unless you want to call yourself a criminal.

Nice let them eat cake moment.

Socialism for thee, libertarianism for me?

Get this walking zombie out of office. Either we need an age limit or term limits.... maybe both. I'm so tired of her and McConnell.

They're so far disconnected from serving the people and the needs of this country it's a joke.

I am happy to hear her say that the US is a free market economy.

It's dangerous when members of the political left try to out-socialist each other in a race to the bottom, so it's refreshing to hear a statement that rejects that virtue-signalling dynamic.

But having restrictions on stock trading, that people voluntarily agree to, as a condition for being allowed to hold office, is perfectly consistent with a free market economy. Holding public office is a privilege, not a right.

It was always like this. Fairness in class society is a illusion!

Assuming that „classless“ society would be fair..

This is a pretty click bait title. Banning congress people and their families from trading any stock altogether is pretty extreme. There are laws against using material non public information in trades that are clearly being violated and these laws should be enforced and strengthened. An outright ban is a bit of a big imposition. Creating narrow trading windows, or requiring trades to be pre-planned are both reasonable approaches, but the article focuses instead on the most extreme form of restriction and ignores any of the more reasonable reforms.

It's not extreme. Being a politician should not be financially rewarding, period.

Agreed that being a politician should not be financially rewarding. There are lots of policy initiatives that can achieve this end. Using insider information is already illegal, but poorly enforced (probably the easiest step here). Implementing restricted trading windows or insisting that people plan their trades ~3 months in advance is also a reasonable policy that is common practice among senior executives at large corporations. Banning people from trading stocks outright is actually quite extreme in America. Basic things like saving for retirement or buying a home effectively require people to buy and sell stocks. Saying that someone can't own stocks just because their aunt is a congresswoman feels like it is going too far.

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.

Right. Lawmakers should follow the regular insider trading rules. They should be considered insiders for all their trades.

I'd do it the other way around, I expect senators to abstain if they even have a whiff of conflict of interest.

> how their legislation affects businesses

Especially the businesses they own shares of...

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.

> you cannot trade on inside information at all.

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.

>" so that the information that senators and congressman are acting on is quickly disseminated."

No matter how quickly this information gets out, they still have first mover advantage. There is simply no way to compete with that.

Publish intention to trade X hours or days before a transaction is agreed upon?

As long as the democrats keep hypocrites like Pelosi around they will never make any progress. She f...ed up the Obamacare negotiations with her super partisan approach. She is just the typical super rich NIMBY progressive who talks one way while at the same blocking any kind of progress that may cost them money or convenience. They talk public schools while sending their kinds to exclusive private schools. They talk about solving homelessness but the only think they do it is to keep it away from their own neighborhoods.

Soon we will we have two 80+ people in leadership of a supposedly dynamic and innovative country. WTF?

It's really hard to argue for this party in its current state. Not that the other guys are any better but it would be nice to have somebody you actually want to vote FOR and not just against the other.

The political squatters have over stayed their welcome among the masses, but they are literally doing the bidding of the super wealthy, all Silicon Valley included.

The pelosi, boxer and other California politicians have been raping opportunity out of the WMD scam for the last few decades with private rebuild contracts going to bechtel in the same way the coffers flow freely to defense families…

Pelosi is a cancer, as are too many other politicians.

We need age limits on Congress. Forced retirement and blocked from lobbying at 65

How much has fauci made during the pandemic, what about the head of the FDA, what about Ahit Pai?

All these people are corrupt scum.

Their in-office-finances should be 100% public record, based on the history of illegal activity these positions constantly prove to commit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com