[lmm]

The point is that all investors should have equal access to information. Of course some investors are more able to fly a surveillance helicopter over a warehouse than others, but there's an equality in principle there: anyone with the money can hire their own helicopter.

If one investor has a friend inside the company and another doesn't, that's different. That's not a difference in resources, that's a difference in how the company itself is treating its investors. It's inequitable on the face; more pragmatically, it makes it much easier for the rich to exploit their advantages if they can just walk up to company officers and bribe them, which exacerbates inequality. Anything the company tells one investor, it is and should be obliged to tell all of them (and all at the same time).

[kasey_junk]

I don't have much of an opinion one way or another about insider trading laws. That said, I think the single biggest benefit to removing them would be destroying this fictional notion that all investors have equal access to ALL potential investor relevant information. This is simply untrue and anyone investing with the idea that it is true is deluding themselves.

Insider trading laws don't try to make everyone have equal access to information, they try to make everyone have equal access to a very constrained subset of information, because any legal scheme that tried to do more than that would be destined to fail.