This thread seems to be in search of a problem. Speculating about which way the wind blows in a judge or bureaucrat’s head is pointless.
Jim, I’d be curious to know what really prompted you to contact the SEC. People don’t normally call the police and ask them about the legality of things unless they have an agenda.
Francis
Pal,
Very insightful.
The first few paragraphs were really a good read, and I agree 100% on the evolution of systems and their distribution - quite an interesting analysis.
Then you started in with the philosophy. Ugh.
W
Jim
You are publically making a statement that what C2 is doing is illegal according to the SEC. A statement not endorsed by the SEC and as far as I know you do not speak for them either.
Firstly, if I was Matthew I would be contacting MY lawyer to see what kind of suit to file against you for publically trying to harm my company with unproven statements. You cannot just go around and make statements that a company is doing something illegal if you cannot prove it. This is a very serious allegation.
Secondly, if I call the SEC on Monday and tell them we have a fellow on the forum for C2, claiming he contacted you and was informed what C2 is doing is illegal, I am willing to bet they will not be too happy with you either.
Thirdly, if I was a stock vendor on C2, I would be contacting other stock vendors to together file a suit against you for harming my business on C2.
Chris
If it is just a matter of which way the wind blows, you’re right. But if the law or formal rules are clear about it, everyone here will have to know it.
In the parallel thread about this topic I gave a link to the relevant law and the formal SEC rules, and invited everyone to find a rule that applies to autotrading. No answer yet.
I’m also curious about Jim’s motives. I asked this several times but he ignores it. But if his motives are hostile, why would he go back to this forum?
Jules
FRANCIS I contacted the SEC b/c I wasnt getting answers here. See the other thread Frequent Questions.
CHRIS MORSE I am publicly making a statement that I BELIEVE there COULD be issues here. I dont work for the SEC as you pointed out. This is a forum, where ideas are exchanged and shared. Thats what a forum does. If Matthew wants to try to sue me for voicing a concern, so be it. If you dont want forum posts that could hurt your business, take down the forum. Once you open up a forum, you are subject to good and bad, just like Matthew tells system vendors if they plan to open a forum thread about their system. Feel free to contact the SEC! Tell them they need to come over to C2 and investigate! That may not work out the way you have planned. As for other stock vendors, feel free to try to sue me!
WOW, for someone that was all gung ho that I was here to sue someone, you seem very quick to do that yourself. Once again, you enlightened this thread with your knowledge and expertise in suing anything.
JULES my motives are SIMPLE ask the question(s) that I did not see asked anywhere. If I have a question and you have a forum available, I am going to ask it. Once again, if registration is needed, that should not cripple C2, just add one more step people need to do. Actually, if you think about it, if registration is required all these crap systems would disappear b/c they would not go through the effort of getting registered.
I guess its easy to assume here that everyone is ok with the current setup, till something happens. Once the SEC comes knockin, well see how many of you stick by Matthew. How many system vendors would be ok with being sued simply b/c Matthew provided incorrect information?
So, if my posts are upsetting you b/c I am asking is this truly legit the way the current setup is, sorry, but EVENTUALLY this question would be asked. By then, it may be to late, but who cares, right?
Jim,
I wasn’t upset by the questions themselves, but by the fact that you brought this to the SEC, and by the fact that you scream imho inaccurate answers.
You write that you didn’t get answers to your questions, but we gave many detailed answers.
‘Asking questions that were never asked’ cannot be your only motive. There are a ziljon of such questions in the world. Why did you pick this particular one? You say that it is important for us, but why is it important for you?
Is this just an academic exercise for you? Do you want to provide a system here and are you afraid of getting trouble with the SEC? If so, I suggest that you get a SEC registration and then you will be on the safe side.
Jules
If it is just a matter of which way the wind blows, you’re right. But if the law or formal rules are clear about it, everyone here will have to know it.
>In the parallel thread about this topic I gave a link to the relevant law and the formal SEC rules, and invited everyone to find a rule that applies to autotrading. No answer yet.
Here is my answer. All rights rest on the fact that man is a productive being. Rights presume that men can live together without anyone’s sacrifice. If man merely consumed objects provided in a static quantity by nature, every man would be a potential threat to every other. In such a case, the rule of life would have to be that which governs the lower species: seize what you can before others get it, eat or be eaten, kill or be killed: the law of the jungle.
All rights rest on the ethics of egoism. Rights are an individual’s selfish possessions - his title to his life, his liberty, his property, the pursuit of his own happiness. Only a being who is an end in himself can claim a moral sanction to independent action. If man existed to serve an entity beyond himself, whether God or society, then he would not have rights, but only the duties of a servant.
Whoever understands this, implicitly accepts the morality of self-interest, and can read off the proper human rights effortlessely; this may cause him to regard such rights, in the wording of the Declaration of Independence, as “self-evident.” Rights, however, are not self-evident. They are corollaries of ethics as applied to social organization - if one holds the right ethics. If one does not, then none of them stands.
The rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness are the only rights treated by philosophical politics. They are the only rights formulated in terms of broad abstractions and resting directly on universal ethical principles. The numerous applications and implementations of these rights, such as freedom of the press or trial by jury or the other prerogatives detailed in the Bill of Rights, belong to the field of philosophy of law and require for their validation a process of reduction to man’s philosophic rights.
By its nature, the concept of a “right” pertains only to action - specifically, to freedom of action. It means freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by other men. Since each man is obliged to be self-sustaining, no one has a right to the actions or products of other men (unless he earns that right through a process of voluntary trade). A right is not a claim to assistance or a guarantee of success. If what one seeks involves the activity of other men, it is their right to choose whether to cooperate or not. A man’s rights impose no duties on others, but only a negative obligation: others may not properly violate his rights.
The right to life is the right to a process of self-preservation; it does not mean that other people must give a person food when he is hungry, medicine when he is sick, or a job when he is unemployed. The right to liberty does not mean that others must satisfy a person’s desires or even to agree to deal with him at all. The right to property does not mean the right to be given property by the government, but to produce and thereby earn it. The right to the pursuit of happiness is precisely that: pursuit is not necessarily attainment. Otherwise, one could claim that his fellows, by withholding their favors, are destroying his happiness and thereby infringing his rights. What then would become of their rights.
If rights are defined in rational terms, no conflict is possible, between the rights of one individual and those of another. Every man is sovereign. He is absolutely free within the sphere of his own rights, and every man has the same rights.
If one detaaches the concept of “rights” from reason and reality, however, then nothing but conflict is possible, and the theory of “rights” self-destructs. Just as bad principles drive out good, so false rights, reflecting bad principles, drive out proper rights - a process that is running wild today in the proliferation of such self-contradictory verbiage as “collective rights.”
“Collective rights” means rights belonging to a group qua group, rights allegedly independent of those possessed by the individual. Thus we hear of the special rights of businessmen, traders, workers, farmers, consumers, the young, the old, the students, the females, the race, the class, the nation, the public. The spokesmen of such groups present demands that violate legitimate rights, either of individuals outside the group and/or of those inside it. The demands range from financial favors; to special powers; to outright slaughter. All such collectivist variants reflect the ethics of self-sacrifice; all the variants divide men into beneficiaries and servants, masters and slaves, and thus negate the concept of “rights,” substituting for it the principle of mob rule.
A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members. In a free society, the “rights” of any group are derived from the rights of its members through their voluntary, individual choice and contractual agreement, and are merely the application of these individual rights to a specific undertaking…
A group, as such, has no rights. a man can neither acquire new rights by joining a group nor lose the rights which he does possess. The principle of individual rights is the only moral base of all groups or associations.
“Individual rights,” in short, is a redundancy, albeit a necessary one in today’s intellectual chaos. Only the individual has rights.
There are no rights to the labor of other men, and no rights of groups, parts of humans, or nonhumans. There are only the rights of man, his right to pursue on his own a certain course of action.
Reason has one and only one social requirement: freedom - such is the essence of the case for man’s rights. Metaphysically, the individual is sovereign (he is a being of self-made soul). Ethically, he is obliged to live as a soverign (as an independent egoist). Politically, therefore, he must be able to act as a sovereign.
Men can choose not to recognize rights, just as they can choose to discard morality or evade reality; but they cannot choose it with impunity. Both in theory and in blood-soaked practice, there is only one alternative to freedom: men’s attempt to live while defying reason’s requirements. This means the attempt to survive without a tool of survival.
Rights are objective principles; they are objective in regard to content and to validation. The source of man’s rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A - and Man is Man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational.
The source of rights, says the subjectivist, is the feelings or laws of the group. This represents an explicit denial of rights. In this view, a man’s “rights” are nothing but permissions granted to him (temporarily) by other men.
In truth, rights are earthly and absolute at the same time, because their source is neither a supernatural entity nor the group, but reality; reality, plus the choice to remain true to it.
No one can turn man into a cog of society; not into a thinking cog. All that one can accomplish by the attempt is to destroy man. A collectivist system, therefore, like any form of irrationality, is necessarily self-defeating, no matter what its specific policies or leaders. Evil is impotent in every version and in every field, politics included.
When men lose the freedom to think, they lose the products of thought as well.
Pal,
I always imagine that you must be drunk when you write this kind of things. Your writing style and the time of posting are both consistent with that hypothesis. Your post apparantly has some internal logic, but it has nothing to do with the topic.
I asked which formal SEC rule says something about autotrading. Your post does not contain a reference to a specific SEC rule, so it is not an answer to my question.
Jules
PAL - ummm… hmmmm… how do you reply to his posts? He should be a legislator and write tax laws, as that is what his writing best looks like. lol.
JULES - you are correct, a small number of you posted your opinion on whether C2 is providing ‘auto-trading’. And that’s all well and good, but in the end, your opinion, my opinion, other opinions here really don’t matter if the SEC disagrees. My initial intent for asking was b/c I was looking to consider offering systems here. That’s it, really. I came across C2 after a couple of Matthew’s ads in trader magazines and after I read the SEC publication on auto-trading, I wanted to know if this issue was handled before. Obviously it hasn’t.
OK guys, I’ve been scolded and am no longer allowed to post here about this topic.
It’s been fun and I wish you the best. In the meantime, I’ll see if I can get my final answer from the SEC after making sure they know my opinion since I am not allowed to post here anymore.
Again MK, if you don’t want posts about your business model, don’t have a forum.
I asked which formal SEC rule says something about autotrading. Your post does not contain a reference to a specific SEC rule, so it is not an answer to my question.
Sorry Jules, I deliberately left out any reference to any specific SEC rules about autotrading. The point is it doesn’t matter because no one’s right has been violated, ie., no contracts have been breached with regards to autotrading.
The nonarbitrary use of force requires objective rules of evidence to establish that a crime has been committed and to prove who committed it, as well as objective rules that define punishments and enforcement procedures.
In a proper society, the goverment is the servant of the citizens, not their ruler. Specifically, it is the agent of man’s self-defense. An agent of self-defense may not initiate force (including its indirect forms, such as fraud or interference) against innocent men. It has a single power, one inherent in the individual’s right to life: the power to use force in retaliation and only against those persons (or nations) who start its use.
By its nature, government has a monopoly on the use of force. In a rational society, individuals agree to delegate their right of self-defense; they renounce the private use of physical force even in self-protection (except during those emergencies that require action at once, before the police can be summoned). If a society is to uphold man’s rights, such delegation is essential.
The use of force against one man cannot be left to the arbitrary decision of another. A society must remove the retaliatory use of force methodically from the realm of whim. Every aspect of such use must be defined in advance, validated, codified: under what conditions force can be employed, by whom, against whom, in what forms, to what extent.
Francis had it right. The laws of a proper society are objective in regard to their validation and, as a result, in regard to their interpretation as well. Since rational laws prohibit only crimes defined in terms of specific physical acts (physical force), the individual is able to know, prior to taking an action, whether or not the law forbids it and what the consequences of disobedience will be. The meaning of such laws is independent of the claims of any interpreter, in any branch of government; it can be grasped from the statement of the law itself. This stands in stark contrast to laws forbidding crimes that are not defined in terms of specific physical acts; e.g., laws against “blasphemy,” “obscenity,” “immorality,” “unfair profits,” or “restraint of trade or auto-trade.” In all such examples, even when the terms are philosophically definable, it is not possible to know from the statement of the law what existential acts are forbidden. Men are reduced to guessing; they have to try to enter the mind of the legislator and divine his intentions, ideas, value-judgments, philosophy - which, given the nature of such legislation, are riddled with caprice. In practice, the meaning of such laws is decided arbitrarily, on a case-by-case basis, by tyrants, bureaucrats, or judges, according to methods that no one, including the interpreters, can define or predict.
Some concrete-bound laws are indefensible, yet still objectively definable; e.g., a law forbidding the sale of alcoholic beverages. But a government prone to such laws cannot legislate an infinite number of concretes; it has to rely at critical points on abstract formulations that derive ultimately from a non-objective standard of ethics, such as the “will of God” or the “public welfare.” In essence, therefore, the law of such a country is non-objective in regard both to validation and to interpretation. The only system of laws that excludes every element of the non-objective - of the indefensible and the unknowable - is one that confines legislation to the protection of individual rights.
Non-objective law contradicts and defies the whole reason man needs government. Such law - in any variant, religious or social - represents a monopoly on the use of force granted to an agency ruled by whim. This means a government of men and not of laws, i.e., a formal authorization for the state to swallow up the citizens. In such a society, the right to life is discarded; men act by permission - and in terror.
Totalitarian theorists and leaders, understanding this point, insist on non-objective legal codes. These men do not demand obedience only to knowable edicts, however vicious; they understand that an individual can still struggle to remain sovereign internally in such a case and conform only outwardly. The totalitarian goal is to inculcate servility - to make the citizens spend their lives trying to anticipate the government’s next whim - to make men beat the ruler to the punch and obey his decrees before he gets around to decreeing them. This is a more potent method of breaking men’s spirit than the policy of enacting cruel but clear-cut laws.
This leads to an essential function of government: the protection and enforcement of contracts, including the resolution of disputes that arise therefrom - their impartial resolution, in accordance with objectively defined laws.
The purpose of government is to bar men’s use of physical force against others for any reason - in part, by protecting men from aggressors, domestic or foreign; in part, by settling impartially disputes that involve men’s rights.
This purpose entails three and only three governmental functions. These are: the police to protect men from criminals - the armed services, to protect men from foreign invaders - the law courts, to settle disputes among men according to objective laws. Any additional function would have to involve the government initiating force against innocent citizens. Such a government acts not as man’s protector, but as a criminal. Its function is to protect freedom, not truth or virtue.
If the agency with a monopoly on coercion undertakes to enforce ideas, any ideas, whether true or false, it thereby reverses its function; it becomes the enemy, not the protector, of the free mind and thus loses its moral basis for existing.
In a proper society, the citizens have rights, but the government does not. The government (not the citizens) acts by permission, as expressed in a written constitution that limits public officials to defined functions and procedures.
Rights remain an absolute; i.e., the principles governing the government are not subject to vote.
The “consent of the governed” is the source of a government’s power, since government is an agent of its citizens. But this does not mean that the citizens can delegate powers they do not possess. It does not mean that anything to which the governed consent is thereby proper or a proper function of government - which would be pure subjectivism and collectivism. The government may not rightfully strike down an innocent fellow-citizen, not in any form, even if the nation consents to it without a dissenting voice.
The source of a government’s power is not arbitrary consent, but rational consent, based on an objective principle. The principle is the rights of man.
How would the large number of overseas vendors, in places like Russia and China, register with the SEC?
There is a difference between asking clarification on something and presenting your opinions as facts. When you present statements based on false and unproven information and pretend you speak for someone else, the SEC in this instance, you are crossing the line. This has nothing to do about C2 making the forum available. Just because there is a forum, does not give you the legal right to make false statements on a forum. You can ask questions and seek clarification about a business model, but if you state flat out that a business model is illegal, you better be sure you can prove it.
If I for example start posting on forums, that company ABC, is involved in illegal business practises based on unproven information, but state it as facts, do you think the company will just sit back and do nothing? Do you think just because a forum is available for you to make posts, you can make any statement you want about anything and don’t have to be able to back it up with facts?
Look at your very first post. You even put your statement in bold and go as far to say that there is no grey area. But yet, your statement have no legal base and is totally unproven and not endorsed by the SEC.
You should thank Matthew for just scolding you and not allow you to post anymore about this topic. You can pretend to be all brave, but Matthew indeed have a very strong legal case against you if you cannot prove your statements and if it turns out that the SEC does not agree with your believes. Something you probably should have confirmed with the SEC in writing before posting your “statements”. Slander is a very serious topic for any business.
Chris
Does anybody even read these multipage off-topic ramblings from Pal? I soon as I see its more of the same crap I just move on to the next (on-topic) post.
Pals writings are more on topic than they might seem. His latest is directed at the SEC and how the SEC needs to leave people alone, in fact the SEC should not even exist.
People can and should protect themselves, but as long as some people think the government will take care of them they are in trouble on more than one front.
Without the SEC we have no topic.
Jim
If you want to offer a system and you are so sure that a registration is needed, then just get a registration and be done with it. If I want advise from someone else, and we’re both happy with it, then I don’t see what gives you the moral right to try to let the SEC interfere with it. Let alone if we’re both foreigners.
Jules
