[jimkleiber]

> You can’t really have it both ways, you can’t have a super strong social safety net for people who lose it all and a system where it’s easy to gamble your life savings on incredibly unregulated markets and incentive all the scammers to come out of the woodwork.

I really liked this point. Then I thought about it more and I think the reason why we have accredited investor laws is because we don't actually have that strong of a social safety net. For example, I've often wondered how much risk people would be free to take if we had a UBI or government dividend or whatever ya wanna call it. If people had a guaranteed income (or guaranteed home or guaranteed other basic service), how much more risk would people be able to take? I imagine a lot.

Conversely, I've worked in entrepreneurship in the US and in East Africa. In East Africa, I think because there's very little social safety net (government provided, there's more social safety in family networks), it can be really really risky to try to be an entrepreneur.

All that to say that I think if, frankly, the ones who win the bets they place would put more money into social safety nets, then others could take more bets as well. I just think sometimes the people who win the bets they place think they won because they're skilled not because of mostly random luck and then don't contribute to government or non-government social safety nets, thus we make laws preventing the majority of people making bets that could drop them through the safety net that currently exists.

[qeternity]

> Then I thought about it more and I think the reason why we have accredited investor laws is because we don't actually have that strong of a social safety net. For example, I've often wondered how much risk people would be free to take if we had a UBI or government dividend or whatever ya wanna call it. If people had a guaranteed income (or guaranteed home or guaranteed other basic service), how much more risk would people be able to take? I imagine a lot.

Yes, and then what do you do when they have taken all that risk with their UBI? UBI only works if you draw the line there - you have to tell people there is no other support. Otherwise they will just gamble their UBI away and fall back on the same safety nets that currently exist.

[KarlKemp]

The point is sort-of the official reasoning behind the rules as they are. People will promise they'd accept all consequences of their actions. But we restrict people's freedom to trade away their own future freedom to such a degree. You can sign up for the Army for 5 years, yes. You can't sell yourself into indentured servitude. Somewhere in between those two, there's a (vague) line we've decided to draw.

Very comparable: the idea of just letting unvaccinated people die in hospital parking lots. Yes, they were stupid. Yes, they were told about as much. But no, that's not the sort of offense that warrants the death penalty. No, not even if you suspect they'd gladly let you die of your delayed reaction to the vaccine, if that were actually a thing.

[6510]

The simple solution would be to limit investment by income and savings and tax the winnings appropriately.

The real problem is that we need much more investment in ideas that are considered good/useful by some kind of democratic standard. This is a monstrosity of a puzzle to figure out. It would take a long quest transforming the questions it raises to the quality required and much effort in gathering usable data before any kind of possible answers (read 'bad') could be considered.