The solution there has to be oversight to identify when a regulator is misbehaving.
Though I'm fine with limiting their ownership to zero for purely rational reasons. A few thousand bucks worth of loss/gain might still sway small borderline decisions.
Once the investigation starts, absolutely. But forcing a regulator to sell their $10k stake in Apple prior to investigating them creates its own weird incentives.
But anyone with stock investments at this scale is already seeing their portfolio swing a couple hundred dollars on the regular. Regulators also have far more to lose in their career (paying potentially millions over the multi-year course of their tenure) by making the wrong decision than they would by swinging their portfolio a couple hundred bucks on a given day.
We can't realistically demand that all public regulators abstain from investing in, for example, an S&P 500 index fund that holds several percent of Apple stock. If the job came with a requirement that the job holder couldn't invest standard index funds, anyone who knows anything about investing and financial planning would avoid the job at all costs.
There has to be a compromise. You can't demand absolute zero financial interest in things like index funds over the mere chance that someone might make an irrational career-harming move to swing their portfolio a couple hundred bucks.
This is pretty typical behavior, actually. I grew up Mormon, Mormons complain about people making polygamy jokes about them but also make polygamy jokes themselves. It's an in-group vs out-group thing: we can make those jokes.
Mentioning Toyota's EV situation on HN is a little more relatable for this crowd.