I find this perspective so incredibly frustrating. Its as if people feel that stock investments need to have zero risk. Anyone who dumps their entire life savings into a pre-seed startup and gets wiped out, quite frankly, deserved it.

Matt Taibbi would serve the public much better if he wrote about the real world risks involved in these investments, the need for diversification, and other ways for individuals to make risk appropriate investments..

This was submitted earlier and got no discussion, so I resubmitted it with a more neutral title.

Taibbi has some excellent points. Overall, in the long run, this is going to hurt the startup industry. There will be numerous publicized incidents of massive fraud. Many people will lose their money and they will tar the entire industry with that perception. Casual investors are going to get robbed blind by scam artists, and anyone intending to run a real, honest business should be against these legal changes.

I agree. I think we're too busy cheering about how smart and progressive we are, making it so that games and iPhone stands can get crowdfunded, to realize that this is going to come back to bite us. In this case, someone outside the industry, like Taibbi, is a good sanity check, though he does have his own reasons for opposing it.