inventor ethics


atlashead

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17 hours ago, atlashead said:

What should I do?

AH,

1. Learn the rules of the game.
2. Play it better than others do.

or

Move to where they have different rules.

or

Quit.

I don't think there are any other reality-based options.

If you chose the first option and know the game is rigged, learn how to find the loopholes. You will have to make a choice on what is more important, the love of inventing or disgust at rigged games. If you let disgust prevail, you will quit.

Michael

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1 hour ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

AH,

1. Learn the rules of the game.
2. Play it better than others do.

or

Move to where they have different rules.

or

Quit.

I don't think there are any other reality-based options.

If you chose the first option and know the game is rigged, learn how to find the loopholes. You will have to make a choice on what is more important, the love of inventing or disgust at rigged games. If you let disgust prevail, you will quit.

Michael

I remember reading that there are a lot of blurry patents out there, covering just about everything, so if you do have a marketable idea I would suggest hiring a patent attorney.

The Alchemist

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  • 4 weeks later...

From: Allen Weingarten To: OWL Subject: OWL: Insider Trading Date: Fri, 06 Jun 2003 10:31:22 -0400. The fundamental question about insider trading is what is wrong with it. When investors find an area that they deem promising, they ought to take advantage of that information. The sooner they act on it, the more advantageous it is for the economy. Insider trading compensates entrepreneurs for their activities and for the risk taken. Nor is there any obligation to inform competitors of what they know.  (Their acting on that information informs the public that they believe an area is promising.)  It might also be noted that useful information is necessarily insider in nature. That is precisely the information that business should act upon. The arguments against it appear to stem from envy and resentment of the wealthy, coupled with the desire for the government to intervene in the economy. That is why the law has been framed in so vague a manner, that one cannot determine what will be prosecuted, and what will be disregarded. If we prosecute people for having advantages that others do not share, we might as well prosecute them for intelligence, beauty, and wit. Is someone victimized, if another wins the mate he sought, by dint of superior qualities? (Walter Williams laments the loss for all of those women who cannot have his services, because his wife unfairly took him out of circulation.) Weingarten

From: "Lance Neustaeter" To: "OWL" Subject: OWL: Re: Insider Trading Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2003 17:57:57 -0700 On Wednesday, 04 June, 2003 20:14 [GMT+1=CET], Paul Hibbert <phibbert@comcast.net> wrote: Jonathan Barrett said: "...there is at first sight no 'victim'..." The victim is not hard to find. It is the person(s) who bought the shares from the insider. If the insider had waited for the news to hit the street the buyer(s) would have paid less for them.

Yikes.  THIS is a huge conceptual blur that seems to be rampant in modern society:  The notion that my not giving you something which was never yours to begin with is somehow "harming" you.  To have clear thinking, first refuse to use the statists concepts. Lance

From: Paul Hibbert To: "objectivism Subject: OWL: Re: Insider Trading Date: Mon, 09 Jun 2003 08:57:51 -0600 Even the Mises Daily Article: http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=1246 completely miss the basic fact that the shareholders are the owners of the company. Any corporate officer who publicly advocated elimination of insider trading rules would be immediately removed by the shareholders because it is not in the interest of the rank and file, i.e. the majority of shareholders. The companies themselves want insider trading rules because there would be nobody except insiders willing to buy shares in an IPO that wasn't regulated in some manner. Don't dare portray me as an advocate of regulating the economy but this is one area that free enterprisers will favor. Insider trading is an instance of fraud where the insiders have a conflict of interest. Paul

From: Jcc1 To: objectivism Subject: OWL: Insider Trading -- Another perspective Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2003 20:00:30 EDT Look at unregulated markets.  Sports wagering, despite its quasi-legal status in the United States, is a good example.  The market participants all know that there are people out there who are privy to information not broadcast by the media.  At any time players can sustain an injury or have events occur in their personal lives which may affect their future performances.  In very rare instances players purposely lost games to make money betting against their own team!  Caveat Emptor. To gain a theoretical edge in any zero-sum game you need access to information others don't have or need to be able to use existing data more efficiently. Trading options, playing poker, or betting on a football game, your winnings are someone else's losses.  I would suggest playing against weak opponents. Information has value.  I think it is arbitrary for the government or any regulatory agency to determine what information you can or can't use to make investment decisions.  To pretend that people with access to information don't use it to their advantage is naive. Jeremy Caplan Chicago, IL

From: Paul Hibbert To: "objectivism Subject: OWL: Re: Insider Trading Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2003 17:42:16 -0600 Michael M wrote Mon 06/09/2003 in reply to me: "Caveat emptor." to my statement: "Without insider trading regulations CEOs, for instance, could make negative statements about their company, dump their stock, make positive announcements and buy it back, ad infinitum."

Really! The situation is exactly the same as a lawyer who is supposed to represent you and turns out to be representing your opponent. When your lawyer betrays you are you going to say, "caveat emptor"? The officers of the company are paid to represent the stockholders. When they act for their own interest instead they are betraying the trust you, as a stockholder, put in them. Whether they do the insider trading for themselves or give privileged information to their friends is irrelevant. Someone else brought up the question of finding information dropped by someone on the street. Would it be legal or moral to trade on that information? Certainly, but you don't know if it is legitimate or if it is planted by a manipulator spreading false news. In this case I would say, "caveat emptor". I have observed that the Mises daily email (I am a long time reader) and many Objectivists try to validate every rich person who runs afoul of the law independent of the facts. This is as objectionable as a liberal who tries to condemn every capitalist as a greedy pig. This discussion is getting absurd and this is my last posting on the subject. Paul Hibbert

From: Michael DeVault To: "Lance Neustaeter" CC: OWL <objectivism Subject: Re: OWL: Insider Trading Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2003 15:22:05 -0500 At 12:32 PM 6/10/2003 -0700, Lance Neustaeter wrote: >Sans explicit contract, I don't see why I would have any natural obligation to give anyone else any information I possess, no matter how much it could possibly benefit them.  I could go to the corner store and argue that if the owner would only cut his prices in half, I'd be so much happier.  He would rightly say, "So what?"

This is an apples-to-oranges equivocation. Insider trading is *not* about making the buyer happy. It is about *not victimizing* the buyer who is defrauded when he purchases a stock about which you know something he doesn't. You are trading something of a lesser value (a crap stock) for something of a greater value (cash money). The buyer, however, is led to believe--either by your actions *or your inaction*--that he is getting value-for-value, which, as in the case of Stewart and the Imclone deal, the buyer of your stock is *not getting.* Again, I use the car analogy. It is illegal not to disclose that a car has a cracked head or some other mechanical defect. Just as selling you a lemon car is a form of fraud, so is selling you a lemon stock. Michael DeVault

From: Mmail Reply-To: MichaelMpost Subject: Re: OWL: Insider Trading Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2003 02:14:07 -0400 Michael DeVault wrote, Thursday June 12: "This is an apples-to-oranges equivocation. Insider trading is *not* about making the buyer happy. It is about *not victimizing* the buyer who is defrauded when he purchases a stock about which you know something he doesn't. You are trading something of a lesser value (a crap stock) for something of a greater value (cash money). The buyer, however, is led to believe--either by your actions *or your inaction*--that he is getting value-for-value, which, as in the case of Stewart and the Imclone deal, the buyer of your stock is *not getting.*"

Speaking of apples and oranges! This statement (and Michael's position in general) is from some other politics that bears only the slightest, superficial resemblance (if any) to the radical capitalism that is an integral branch of Objectivism. First of all, value-for-value exchanges do not occur among uncoerced men. Free trades occur only when both traders value what they acquire more than what they give up. When values are equal there is nothing to motivate one to trade. Furthermore, in the context of a trade, nothing ever has any intrinsic value. The value of things traded is the value the traders place on them -- separately and differently, rightly or wrongly.

The quality of the information, knowledge, and judgment with which the traders make their assessments of value is entirely their own responsibility. It is never right for a government to assist in the exercise of that responsibility. Its sole assignment is to sustain the validity of the adjective "uncoerced." It is the ability and self-discipline to sustain this distinction that separates the radical capitalist from the Libertarian and Republican pretend-capitalists. Michael's references to the bad consequences that befall traders who do not ascertain in advance of a purchase whether a CEO has contractually required standards for the accuracy of his information or fullness of disclosure -- or what his official policy is on the circumstances under which he may or may not trade his own securities -- is not a valid argument for intervention under a capitalist government. A capitalist government does not concern itself at all with the good or bad consequences of uncoerced trades. And his references to auto sale disclosure laws and the lemon laws does not justify government intervention in anything either.  These coercive laws dictate the terms of traders' contractual agreements. A capitalist government's job is to enforce the terms the traders choose on their own. It is not to choose the terms for them. Under a capitalist government, owners retain the right to offer any and all values for sale "as is" -- without any terms or guarantees, and buyers retain the right to buy offerings absent terms or guarantees if they so choose. Insider trading laws violate those rights. Michael M

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