"why should only people with good credit be able to buy houses?"
Because typically banks won't give you loans without ability to pay them back. (sans moral hazards)
This equity purchase is at least equivalent to gambling which is already legal, and yea the latter has bad effects - like alcohol, cigarettes, etc.
Also see: nearly all product marketing that sells you shit you don't need, American culture in general that glorifies "livin' it up" instead of thrift, etc.
If you have a problem with JOBS Act on these grounds - you have a much broader fight, and I hope you're as outspoken about those issues as this one.
The reference was to the mortgage crisis, where unscrupulous mortgage brokers colluded with banks and credit reporting agencies to give mortgages to people who could not repay them. Triggering a remarkable financial crisis which still reverberates over 5 years later.
And to re-iterate, as this tends to get lost sometimes in examples, my position is that I am for broader participation in the early investing stages of companies, but I am also a fan of a "fence" or a "marker" which mitigates the risk of bad actors pulling in unqualified participants. The "qualified investor" rules are just such a fence.
One more example then. Criminals are a small fraction of a population, but the harm they do is disproportionate. The number of mortgage brokers who were acting fraudulently was a small percentage of the total, and yet the harm they was quite high.
Large, interconnected systems, with humans providing some of the linkages are difficult to manage. And some of the humans are trying to "game" that system all the time. My claim is that the "qualified investor" gate is a mechanism which is a current inhibitor on the games players in terms of potential victims for investment fraud. Loosening the rules, as was done in terms of mortgage qualification in early 2000's, will give these bad actors the pool of victims they need to fund their games. The damage they will do will be disproportionate to any gain we might have achieved by getting a company funded which would have otherwise gone unfunded. I hope I am shown to be wrong in this fear, but it is my current best guess at how this "crowdfunding early investment" change plays out.
Because typically banks won't give you loans without ability to pay them back. (sans moral hazards)
This equity purchase is at least equivalent to gambling which is already legal, and yea the latter has bad effects - like alcohol, cigarettes, etc.
Also see: nearly all product marketing that sells you shit you don't need, American culture in general that glorifies "livin' it up" instead of thrift, etc.
If you have a problem with JOBS Act on these grounds - you have a much broader fight, and I hope you're as outspoken about those issues as this one.