Take em down

At a hedge fund conference today a certain former SEC Commissioner who has a beard and a freshly minted hedge fund of his own held forth on regulation and other matters, and then some guy in the audience asked a question pertaining to the SEC's recent proposed rule change restricting hedge fund investment to people with $2.5 mln plus to invest: "I don't like the government telling me what I can and can't invest in! That's not the role of goverment."

And our speaker agreed heartily. Since nobody else was gonna ask a question and I stood up and said: "That's a spurious line of argument. Nobody argues that babies shouldn't ride in car seats, or that seatbelt laws are outside the government's domain, and we've had graphic evidence of their utility in NJ recently" (i.e. our stupid cocky governor not wearing one and getting himself almost killed).

You woulda thunk I had dropped sweet little baby jesus off the motel roof. This hirsute former regulator actually said this: "I don't wear a seatbelt because it's the law, I wear it because it's rational to do so. Blah blah blah" This is rank puerile crap. The effectiveness of seatbelt laws is evidenced by reduced incidence of traffic fatalities. It's not about some cowboy sentiment of who's got a right to do what. Corzine should be made personally liable for the expenses his recklessness caused the taxpayers of our fair state to incur, and the trooper who was driving him should be fired for not making him wear a seatbelt.

And somebody should come back around to address the fundamental point about the government's right to protect citizens from themselves as per hedge funds. Which is a different argument altogether from whether the government should exercise that right and how it should do so.