Gupta is part of the crony capitalists, he’s no small fry as this article seems to suggest.
However, officers of corporations are given certain benefits, such as limited liability, in exchange for following the laws of the governmental entity that has allowed them to incorporate. If a government requires all of the officers of a company to hop on one foot for at least one hour each week in order to remain incorporated then so be it.
It happens that the insider trading law makes a lot of sense, unlike a law requiring corporate officers to hop on one foot.
If insider trading were allowed then it could reasonably be surmised that an even larger share of the profits from stock investing would go to an even smaller percentage of the population. This could very well lead everyone that wasn't a member of a corporate board to cease investing in stocks.
Why would you want that to happen?
If I knew that people were allowed to trade insider information with their close friends, and I wasn't a close friend then I would be an idiot to invest.
Corporations do not have some inalienable right to exist. They are a public convenience. They serve a useful purpose when properly regulated. Certainly they are overregulated in some areas, but allowing, for example, a single business to speculate with fractional banking reserves backed by U. S. taxpayers is reckless indifference of the highest order.
As has been shown by the recent housing bubble and crash it can clearly be shown that they have not been properly regulated. Allowing the crony bastards to trade inside information would merely compound the current level of stupidity.