Unauthorized free speech, comrade

Let's talk about two brilliant things the government is doing to us. One is discussed in the excerpt below. One of the ten thousand suffocating and unnecessary details packed into the finance bill is an absurd strangulation of the ability of small businesses to get start-up money.

"First, Dodd's bill would require startups raising funding to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and then wait 120 days for the SEC to review their filing. A second provision raises the wealth requirements for an "accredited investor" who can invest in startups - if the bill passes, investors would need assets of more than $2.3 million (up from $1 million) or income of more than $450,000 (up from $250,000). The third restriction removes the federal pre-emption allowing angel and venture financing in the United States to follow federal regulations, rather than face different rules between states…

Registering an offering with the SEC can be VERY expensive. Legal and accounting bills can mount up to a $100,000 before you know it. And does the SEC really want to monitor 50,000 additional offerings each year? Do you think there would be any hope of a 4-month response time? The most a poor regulator could do would be a cursory reading to make sure the proposal checked all the boxes. I can tell you that an angel investor does more than cursory checking before he puts in money.”

Second is the administration's current war on freedom of speech. They're waging it vigorously on many fronts. Consider this: according to the new rules I will have to get a license from the federal government in order to exercise my constitutionally guaranteed free speech rights. They need to be able to confirm and control that it is the right kind of free speech that they like. The FTC and FCC have introduced many, many new regulations to make sure that the government overlords are able to ration free speech in a way that is most advantageous to them. Well, at least when the Supreme Court ruled that the FCC had no authority to take over the internet, the FCC waited a full two weeks before announcing they were going to seize control of it anyway. Very respectful.