The prize for best analogy of the week goes to Matt Levine

Actually last week but I'm playing catch-up.

From the April 19th newsletter [emphasis added]

But yesterday’s hearing undermines my view. There are members of Congress who seem to think that crypto is valuable and innovative, that the SEC is stifling innovation, etc., all the stuff that was standard in 2021 and that retreated after the high-profile crypto frauds and failures in 2022. Ahead of the hearing, all the Republicans on the committee sent Gensler a letter “slamming the Commission’s approach to digital asset regulation and attempts to force digital asset trading platforms to ‘come in and register’ under the ill-fitting national securities exchange (NSE) framework.” “To date,” they write, “the SEC has forced digital asset market participants into regulatory frameworks that are neither compatible with the underlying technology nor applicable because the firms’ activities do not involve an offering of securities.”

...

Third, there was pushback against Gensler for not owning or using crypto. “It is hard to understand something without using it,” writes Anthony Pompliano. “The idea that we have regulators who are actively making rules for something that they have never used seems confusing.”

This seems like a simple mistake. Nobody asks the administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration if she has ever used meth. “How can you regulate meth if you have never used meth” is a non sequitur. “How can you understand meth if you have never used meth,” similarly, has easy answers: You can look at the science and sociology of how it affects people, decide that it’s bad, and regulate it accordingly.