[javert]

Then you don't want to live in a society, you want to live in the Soviet Union. Because nobody can tell you if a business is a fraud in advance. There is no all-seeing, all-knowing bureaucrat that can detect Ponzi schemes. You just have to take away people's permission to do stuff. Which is ridiculous---Ponzi schemes only hurt people who are reckless. Why punish and impede all of us for the sake of reckless people? Your viewpoint is literally uncivilized.

[I-M-S]

The totality of my life experience has shown me it's precisely the other way around - it's the reckless people who punish and impede us all for their sake. Just like there are no all-knowing bureaucrats who can detect Ponzi schemes, there are none who can detect systemic risks either.

[_Algernon_]

Whatever the soviet union was or wasn't, it was still a society. Making such exaggerated claims makes it difficult to lend the rest of your arguments any credence.

[javert]

It was a slave pen. But that's neither here nor there.

[_Algernon_]

Lot's of societies through history had slavery. Doesn't stop them being societies.

[stale2002]

> Then you don't want to live in a society, you want to live in the Soviet Union

I think that there are many in between states for society, between the two extreme points of "allow ponzi scheme investments to be sold to uninformed investors" and "Communist dictatorship".

Instead of either of those two extremes, we could choose a middle ground of "Liberal democracy, where people running ponzi schemes are prosecuted".

> There is no all-seeing, all-knowing bureaucrat that can detect Ponzi schemes

Nothing is perfect. But it doesn't have to be. The government can just go after the obvious ones, at a very minimum, and get it mostly correct.