Insider Tips as Currency for Political Extortion

I would not trade on an exchange that allows insider trading: I have no wish to sell a stock that's known (to the buyer but not to me) to be about to go up; or to buy one that is known, to the seller but not to me, to be about to go down. It turns out that I've been a chump: the US Congress legislated its members, and their cronies in the Executive branch, out of all provisions, legal and contractual, against insider trading.

Many of our federal legislators and officials supplement their already juicy salaries and benefits by extorting bribes. But there is the technicality that bribes in cash or equivalent are illegal, and a provision exempting legislators from laws against getting paid off in cash wouldn't fly with the voters. So instead, they gave themselves a loophole: they legislated that the insider trading laws that apply to businessmen, and other non-members of the aristocracy of pull, do NOT apply to members of Congress, congressional staffers, and appointed officials of the executive branch. Thus, members of the US Congress have made themselves legally free to extort at will, provided the payoffs are not in cash or stock or other valuables, but rather in the form of insider information that the Congresscritters, etc., can use to steal value (legally - they made it so) directly from the retirement funds and other investments of the rest of us.

The link comes, ironically, from an organization dedicated to radical expansion of government power - and thus, of government-as-an-extortion-racket in general - a position its members justify, in part, by a naive belief that everything would be all right if only such loopholes were closed. Their opponents, on the other hand, insist that there is nothing morally wrong in insider trading - even when insider information is being used as the currency in which bribes are extorted from American business by our political rulers. "Against stupidity, the Gods themselves contend in vain..."