Jail time

I don’t think I want anyone to go to jail, ever.

I spent a few hours today staring at pictures of the man with the longest prison sentence in history for insider trading.

He was guilty, he was totally guilty without a doubt. He was so obviously guilty, that when his team appealed the verdict, the ruling said “actually, you were even MORE guilty than we thought the first time around!”

I don’t actually have a rational defense that I can make, “this guy doesn’t deserve to go to jail because a and b so therefore c and thus I am right.” I don’t have that. He broke laws, he thought he could get away with things that had been deemed illegal, he didn’t help his own case one bit by being non-cooperative, etc.

But I’m not really talking about a rational want. I’ve been looking at this guy’s pictures. There are pictures of his arrest, doing the perp walk, handcuffs and everything. In one particular picture, his lip is curled a bit and he is biting it and looks kind of pained. I have cried enough in public to know that look very well. He is trying not to loose it. He never, ever thought that he would be where he is right now, in this picture.

And he doesn’t look like a power broker, he doesn’t look like your typical big shot wall street man.  Most of the other guys from this insider trading round up are pretty good looking, in that privilege and money and power kind of way. Trim and fit, nice hair, good faces of the well bred and well raised. They probably have beautiful trophy wives. This guy probably has a beautiful trophy wife too, though, because you can buy those I’m pretty sure. But he wouldn’t look as picture banker perfect. He is kind of pudgy, and he smiles more than the other guys do, who are doing the stone cold guilty look. It makes him look boyish, or like he would have been your favorite teacher in school, who giggled a little too much but was really good at what he did. It makes it easier to sympathize with him and harder to send him to jail. For 11 years.

I just hate the idea of jail, so much, for anyone, especially someone that I can sympathize with, which how could you not after spending several hours looking at pictures of this person smiling or crying or emoting in some subtle way?

Jail sounds like a terrible place. And insider trading sounds like such a made up thing sometimes. There must be rules for society, but must it be like this?

Anyway, I want to interview the FBI agents who are responsible for all this busting, about their feelings. Maybe after the fact, like in 5 years or 10 years, when they can speak more candidly.  

I read about insider trading for one day and now I have an opinion about it and so I deserve to be heard.

Trade regulations and securities laws are so weird.

It is weird to me that information that one person may know is illegal information for another person to know. Or rather, for them to know it and act on it. The idea being that if you know something that other people don’t—have insider knowledge—and then use it to make money in investments and the stock market, that isn’t fair to people.

What a weird thing to care about in terms of fairness. This idea of fairness presupposes that if you know something that other people don’t and you act on it in a way that benefits you at the expense of others, that is unfair. Okay, fine, if that’s what you think. Make it a law, even. But what about the thousands of times that happens in life, all the time, every day?

When interviewing for TFA, I interviewed a ton of former TFA corps members (well, 3 or 4 I think) and they gave me a ton of tips: don’t say this, do say that, I said this and it worked out well, someone at the group interview said this and it was really dumb. This is the stuff that TFA cares about, this is the insider knowledge. And I am sure that put me ahead of the competition in many ways. Was that insider trading? I think this happens all the times with jobs. Hey, I know somebody who works there, let me tell you what they will want to hear, and you will get the job.

I think I have a personal bone to pick with this, so maybe I am way off base here and this doesn’t even compare, but other people have tons of advantages, things that they know that others don’t, things that they understand that others don’t, things people have told them that others haven’t. Some of that has been gotten through hard work, but a lot of it is dumb luck and some form of an unfair advantage.

There aren’t laws about that kind of thing. You don’t have to sign non-disclosure agreements about daily life stuff, but if there is a powerpoint for your pharmaceutical company that says “Do not share”, and you share it, you have obviously crossed some line. Good point. I think if you promise to keep a line and other people expect you to keep to a line, than you should. I walk the line.

But those lines so often feel so arbitrary.

For example, going back to finance: everything revolves around having more information than the next guy, and making better financial bets and hedges than the next guy because of what you know that they don’t. That is the basis of the industry. Everyday, you are working hard to find some edge. So of course it feels somewhat arbitrary when someone says “this information here? This is okay and you can make decisions based on this information. Oh, but that information over there? That information is off limits, and you cannot use it to inform your decisions.” Or course that just seems nonsensical, and absurdist.

Which makes me say that I don’t really think these SEC rules are real moral imperatives—it really is what you can get away with. Just because something is illegal, well that doesn’t have anything to do with right and wrong, or fairness. We should stop kidding ourselves that it is about fairness, you can’t make an industry built around getting advantages over other people play fair. Not that I think we should deregulate or anything, heeeelllllll to the no. No. But I think we should stop kidding ourselves that we are writing rules based on some kind of grand morality, and that’s different.

I think, as a very religious person who is also highly skeptical at the same time, I am in a place to say that most rules are not based on some higher grand purpose or virtue. In Mormonism, we always talk about following the Spirit of the Law rather than the Letter of the Law, and that phrase meant something once and now it is just a terrible cliché. But I think that the Spirit of most laws is largely overhyped, and most of the time, there isn’t really a deeper meaning to what we are doing. And if you can come up with one, it is largely an ex post facto rationalization for why that law might be required of us, and the so-called Spirit or real purpose of the law is a fable. And so what? What really matters more than just following the will of God, even if you must to do petty and purposeless things (along with hard and trying sacrifices), if that is what is required of you? The Pharisees weren’t rebuked because they had tried to figure out how to follow the law of Moses and were doing all these unnecessary laws that they had decided were necessary, they were rebuked for judging unrighteous judgment of others and basically for being major pricks about everything and throwing rocks at people, etc. Please follow the dumb laws, but please don’t stone each other if you aren’t. Because they are probably all dumb anyway. In fact, not even that much later, Peter gets a revelation where he is like, “psych about all that law stuff, eat all the crab you want.” But, as always, I’m very aware that I could be reading way too much of myself into this. Right now, I am following a lot of rules because I promised I would, and those promises are important to me, even if the laws aren’t really.

That all being said, I don’t know what I would do about SEC laws regarding trading if I was in charge of the world. I would not be like “psych about all that law stuff, get secrets and get rich off them.” And I think that there needs to be rules. But I have no idea how to create the right incentives to get people to follow rules and do it for the right reasons with the right consequences for everyone. That is why I couldn’t hack it as a middle school teacher. So in the meantime, I guess everyone please play nice and fair with the money, y’all.