[Cicero]

Many of these people were probably as surprised and disappointed as their shareholders. And to forbid insiders to sell stock, as one fellow suggests in this article, would destroy the very motivation that makes entrepreneurs start new companies.

You start a company, you work like hell, you succeed, you sell some of the stock so you can realize some of the benefits of your work, and then the bottom falls out.

I hate to say it, but that's the way capitalism works. Creative destruction. A hundred companies fail, but one succeeds, and transforms the economy and the country. For a while there the boomer generation thought they had a permanent entitlement to a 15% or more return on their money every year, but that simply isn't possible.

The alternative is centralized control and planning, and over-regulation, so sick companies are kept alive and innovation is killed. That just doesn't work. In the end, people are much worse off. Just ask the Eastern Europeans or even the Japanese.

[mvpel]

I can tell you that the ex-CEO of Metricom, one of the companies mentioned in the article, bought thousands of shares at $85 per share, according to the SEC-mandated insider trading disclosures. I lost $400,000 worth of equity in the course of Metricom's collapse, I can only begin to imagine what he lost.

This article is just another example of the ridiculous socialist, Marxist bent of the Mercury News. Company executives are already extensively restricted in their trading of company stock by the SEC regulations. What does the Merc want, a total ban?

This article is unmitigated class-warfare idiocy, worthy only of Pravda, not an American newspaper.