China's Central Bank Bans ICOs

It boils down if you are willing to accept that stupid people are going to pay for their stupidity (on very real and life-altering consequences) or if they should be shielded from it.

Personally I belong to the side where I'm willing to give up some personal freedoms for a better collective life, that includes saving very stupid people from very stupid decisions that might affect the rest of their lives (and their families').

> If you were to tell any of your progressive friends about Reg-D, but framed it as written by "the 1%" - they'll naturally think the law is unjust and shouldn't exist.

I agree that there is a lot of collectivism in politics, and that "the 1%" rallying cries are mostly a way of controlling a group of people into opposing things they are uninformed about. So discussing anything as being written by "the 1%" is never going to lead to useful discourse. But I don't see why any of that matters.

Also "any of [my] progressive friends"? I don't understand why you're being hostile. I don't really associate with people based on their politics, it makes it too easy to have an echo chamber (or a shouting match). Not to mention that wasn't the point of my comment, it was to ask GGP to expand on their views.

> I think this has less to do with political flavor and more to do with critical thinking skills.

Then why mention (what you assume are) my politics at all?

> Unless Reg-D also bans gambling at Vegas and throwing your money down a well - then it comes up short of it's protectionist goals.

I think gambling should be better regulated, and I think that defrauding people to "throw money down a well" shouldn't be legal. I don't care if you, of your own volition, decide to throw your money down a well (though it actually does cost your country money to re-print said currency). What I do care about is someone trying to defraud you. But this is a complete straw-man, securities laws are about fraud not about being stupid with your money.

I'm not authoritarian, but pretending like regulation over speculative investments are not going to help any unexperienced investors is just ridiculous.

And they will stop people from making bitcoin transactions how, exactly?

It's a bit silly to come in and dismissively say "the state will regulate it anyway" when the whole point of the technology is that it technologically prevents central actors (like a state) from interfering.

It's a bit like saying "nah, the MPAA and RIAA will shut down filesharing." Nope. They shut down Napster (which was centralized), but BitTorrent works just fine thank you very much and the media industry has fundamentally changed as a result.

His point is that the government not only doesn't ban many forms of stupid decisions, but actively encourages ones that provide significant revenue, particularly in the gambling and consumer spending spheres.

"Tu quoque" is actually a pretty useful heuristic for analyzing whether a party's stated goals for a policy align with its actual ones.

We tried libertarianism. It doesn't work. I realize the futility of trying to explain this to someone with the username "rothbardrand" but I used to be a libertarian and I finally broke out of it, so maybe this will give someone else teetering on the edge some things to think about.

1. Libertarianism sweeps negative externalities under the rug. Air quality, noise pollution, the costs to society when an elderly person goes bankrupt. The counter arguments are thin. If you don't ban building in a flood plain, people will build in the flood plain. Then the flood will happen and we'll all be worse off.

2. Libertarianism is inefficient because it demands that people become experts in a wide, wide array of topics in order to be healthy and financially secure. Sometimes becoming an expert in a topic is to experience it. For example, I used to be addicted to nicotine. It's one thing to explain with words how addictive it is, it's another to actually be addicted. By introducing a bit of a nanny state we can use laws and taxes as a kind of cross generational memory and save people from having to learn some of the lessons we had to learn.

3. Libertarianism doesn't address the concept of power. It pits the whole world through the lens of rights when there are other concerns like foreign citizens owning portions of companies critical to our national security or owning large portions of our media.

4. Libertarianism underestimates how much work the state puts towards fighting international crime. We use the financial system to track where mafias hide money and how they organize their money laundering schemes.

The problem with leaving libertarianism is that after years of thinking about everything through the lens of rights and the individual one is left with the question "well, what matters then?" and the answer is difficult, but here is my best shot:

The world is one of consequence. So when think about policies we should be concerned with our ends, but we should choose our ends as if we didn't know who we were in the world beforehand.

So my answer is roughly "consequentialism tempered by individual / human rights".

You don't get to buy into Uber's round because they aren't a public company. If they become a public company they have to open their books. Why? Because widespread fraud happened before this and it wasn't just to little old grandma. Sorry about the violation of your rights, but if I didn't know who I would be beforehand, this is what I think would lead to the best average outcome.

As for the middle class not being able to invest in the best companies, I agree with you that we should change some of our regulations. I agree that the rich are getting richer because not enough companies are going public. Let's fix the regulations that empower investment banks at the expense of the entrepreneurs and potential investors, and while we're at it let's raise taxes on the super rich and close their loopholes.

But at the same time let's acknowledge something else: The middle class and the poor have it best in countries like Sweden or Switzerland or Canada where we have more government not less. Where we have more international cooperation not less. Where we have more "collectivism", more education, more consumer protections, more environmental regulation, more investment into research.

And yes we also have rights too, but they're not these absolute mathematical truths and it doesn't mean we should let a bunch of people skirt fiscal regulation by raising a bunch of money anonymously with ICOs.