Do you believe that any adults get to decide the parameters of a contract with no government intervention.
For example, currently Stock Analysts and Stock Brokers are prohibited from entering into certain types of contracts. It is considered insider trading.
Corporate officials are prohibited from entering into certain types of contracts with officials in competing industries, that is called price fixing.
Do you believe that the government has no role over prohibiting contracts between adults at all? If so, would you support contracts for insider trading and price fixing?
And the very fact that you consider that government to have a role in enforcing it means that the government has a role (by defintion)
If the government ‘gets out of marriage’ that means that it does not enforce it. A hospital could, then, pick and choose who it allows in to see a dying patient, or a landlord can pick and choose who he recognizes as a married couple and thus rents to.
Is that your understanding, that that government has no role?
Before we begin, let’s recognize that we are dealing with “corporations”, which are legal fictions masquerading as individual humans. It is a bit of a non-sequitur to compare the role of government in the contracts of HUMANS with that of CORP’S.
But lets talk about “insider trading”. First, insider trading does not involve the initiation of force against someone, so it shouldn’t be illegal even under a minimal state. Insider trading laws are designed to prevent corporate insiders from profiting from non-public information obtained in the performance of their fiduciary duties to the corporation. At worst, this could result in a civil suit (if the insider violated an agreement with the corporation), but not a criminal charge levied by government prosecutors. If profiting from non-public information should be illegal in one instance, why not in all? Shouldn’t everyone who’s ever gotten a job because they knew the right person be prosecuted?
And even if insider trading in some instance resulted in the loss of stock value for other shareholders, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. There is no such thing as the right to the value of something. Value is determined by the interaction of a multitude of individuals and their economic decisions. To claim a right to the value of something is to claim the right to control the decisions of all those other people. This simple reductio ad absurdum shows that there is no right to value, only to actual property.
Insider trading prohibitions have to do with information and its use. Information is not inherently owed to anyone. Information has value. It takes effort to acquire information. Some entities specialize in acquiring information. They can charge others for access to that information. Some information requires more effort to acquire and would thus command a higher price in an open market. In a completely free society, it’s likely that businesses and organizations would emerge to collect and disseminate information about insider trading. Today we already have things like Consumer Reports–people pay money to get the scoop on various goods and services. The Wall Street Journal already publishes insider trading information on a weekly basis.
More to the point, insider trading is actually a good thing. Corporate executives unloading the stock of their own company sends a signal that all is not well with that company, and it does so much faster and more completely than any process resulting from government mandates and restrictions.
There is no rational basis for the prohibition of insider trading. It stems from envy–from a deep socialistic impulse in many people to prevent others from being wealthier than themselves.