You Can Bet on 36 Red, But Not Amazon.com Angel Shares
I thought this was an interesting irony of our growing corporate state:
In my post "Attention Gov't: This Is How Businesses Are Created" I brought up the point that government regulations keep the average American from investing in ground floor business opportunities with rules specifying how much money someone must have before they can invest in start-ups (unless the start-up is being done by a friend or family member). Government regulations also prevent start-ups from advertising their investment opportunity. If you need ground-floor investment (as opposed to loans) to bring your business to the proverbial next level, there is a wall of regulation that keeps you from asking for it from the general public and specifies what "sophisticated investors" (the already rich) you can approach and how.
Those rules are there to protect us middle class rubes from being taken in by crafty and ill-intentioned businessmen.
I contrasted this protection the government so thoughtfully provides us"“keeping us from making possible bad investments"“with it's promotion of lotteries and acceptance of casino gambling.
Now these people who will not allow an entrepreneur to advertise or promote his start-up in order to get voluntary investment money from people willing to take a risk on the business idea or invention are looking at legalization of online gambling in the USA.
anon:
So unbelievably true. Also note recent articles on campaign finance reforming (checkbox for "salary in between $1,000 to $1,000,000 annually) - how is that for useless and random and cost of renewing alien work permits (to everyone who claims that there's a fair legal process - I get fingerprinted 3 times a year, once for every form I am required to file. In addition to the hundreds of dollars those forms cost to file, it's $350 a pop for every fingerprint set. And yes, those fingerprints are stored in a nationwide computer database and don't really change all that often a lifetime).
July 26, 2010, 6:05 pm