It’s Not Insider Trading If the President Does It

There is a lot going on here, but let’s start with the “everything is securities fraud” angle:

Here’s the letter, which, I want to emphasize, (1) “raises a number of troubling national security questions” and (2) was sent to the SEC. If you think that the actions of the president endanger national security, by recklessly risking war or by recklessly disclosing classified information that could be used by the enemy, you ask the SEC to look into it. This is not because the SEC has any special expertise in or authority over national security—the word “securities” in its name is just a coincidence; that means “stocks and bonds”—but because, in our postmodern world, the securities regulator is the meta-regulator of everything. Pollution and global warming and sexual harassment and animal cruelty and air safety and computer security and corporate lobbying and many other issues of public policy are, surprisingly, under the SEC’s jurisdiction. If a thing is bad, then it is also securities fraud. If you are unhappy about anything at all, the solution is to write to the SEC about it.