From CEI's OpenMarket blog:
Why Matt Taibbi’s Anti-JOBS Act Screed Couldn’t Suck Worse
I have had a range of reactions when reading Matt Taibbi’s pieces in Rolling Stone. Most of the time, I vehemently shake my head, but quite a few times I have found myself nodding in agreement, as in his exposé of the American International Group rescue as a backdoor bailout for Goldman Sachs.
But upon reading “Why Obama’s JOBS Act Couldn’t Suck Worse,” Taibbi’s tired and clichéd screed against the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act — legislation signed into law by President Obama last week to modestly ease regulatory barriers preventing entrepreneurs from accessing capital – my reaction was entirely new. I simply shrugged my shoulders and said to myself about Taibbi, “What an old fart!”
Now it’s true that the 42-year-old Taibbi is only a year older than this humble blogger. But as the expression goes, age is a state of mind. And in penning his column, Taibbi shows his state of mind to be that of a grumpy old man when it comes to entrepreneurship, innovation, and even the Internet in general.
What else is one to make of his statements like this one chastising the law for “giving official sanction to the internet-based fundraising activity known as ‘crowdfunding.’” Yet what Taibbi sees as a foreign and shady concept has gained widespread currency by young artists and musicians raising funds for their projects through sites like Kickstarter.com.
Taibbi may want consult the music section of his own magazine (yes, Rolling Stone still does occasionally run features on music) for this article explaining how online “crowdsource funding” allows “artists dreaming of pressing up a debut album” to “petition … friends and family — plus random strangers — for money to get creative projects off the ground.”
Alyssa Rosenberg, culture blogger for ThinkProgress.com — the blog of the usually lockstep liberal Center for American Progress — penned a very fine post on why the next logical step should be equity crowdfunding in which fans share in the profits of the artists they fund. She concluded that if fans “start acting as investors, maybe they should be treated that way.”
But as I have explained, until the JOBS Act created a specific exemption, that type of equity crowdfunding was most likely illegal under federal securities laws. And Taibbi wants to keep it that way. In an amazing burst of financial elitism, Taibbi implies that no company should be able to access funds from the investing public until it turns a profit....MORE
