I'm not staking out some novel or unique position here. Plenty of free-marketeers and liberty-lovers find laws against "insider trading" to be a farce.
As Reason's Brian Doherty wrote on this subject: "Spreading information about a company that might affect its stock price should not be considered any more inherently unfair, illegal, or bad for the economy than tipping someone off about a forthcoming job opening." (
http://reason.com/hod/bd062502.shtml) And as Ilana Mercer wrote at World Net Daily -- you know, that place where actual conservatives hang out -- "Absent a moral obligation to divulge information, criminal charges are a grotesque overreach, a position emphatically reiterated in the Supreme Court's recent decisions. The Supreme Court has maintained that 'there is no duty to disclose nonpublic information.' " (
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=28003)Fine, pass information about a company around. But when the people who hold the purse strings dump stock in order to save money and stick their investors that PUT THEM THERE with a loss, it is WRONG.