I still haven't figured out what poor Martha Stewart did wrong.  I know what she may have done illegally.  She upchucked her ImClone stock a day before it flushed down her tastefully appointed commode.  Based on insider info.  Particulars the public wasn't privy to.  But what did she do wrong?  She didn't shoot anyone.  Rob anyone.  Defraud anyone.  Those would be crimes to a libertarian.  Insider trading is not.

That's because we're all insider traders.  We're all guilty of doing what the Design Diva did.  Over and over and over.  Do you have a plumber in your family?  An auto mechanic?  A lawyer?  (You don't have to admit that one.)  A hairdresser?  How many times have you swapped favors not available to the general public?  How many times has a teenage babysitter been cheated out of work when you asked grandma to watch the kids?  How many times have you found a bargain at a garage sale and sold it on eBay for triple what you paid?

When my employer pulled my desk chair out from under my underside, a coworker told me to call his wife.  She was heading up a project at another company.  To hire me she first had to convince her boss that (a) she needed another hand, and (b) I was the best hand at hand.  I was hired.  Because the job was never advertised to the public, that made all of us insider traders.  But job search gurus nationwide encourage this kind of skullduggery.  They call it "networking."

When my seventeen-year-old air conditioner keeled over with a heat attack in the middle of a Texas August I didn't go finger-walking through telephone book display ads.  I called my son-in-law.  He's an a/c expert.  He used his professional license to score a new compressor at the wholesale price and installed it for me.  I paid for parts and coolant, but not for his labor.  He doesn't work free for the general public.  Were we guilty of insider trading?  People everywhere call this "families helping each other."

A friend went to the local libations outlet for a jug of rum.  She likes the occasional Cuba Libre.  It means Free Cuba.  It has a nice ring, and taste, to it.  A clerk sidled up and advised against buying the big bottle.  Two one-liter bottles together cost less than the 1.75-liter size, and you get an extra quarter liter of booze to boot.  So unless this salesperson stood there all day, everyday, informing every customer about this pricing peculiarity, my friend benefited financially from an insider's tip.  Should they both be arrested?  There's a term for this kind of conniving.  It's called "being friendly."

And how do you figure Ed Wallace?  He's a local car columnist who covers Detroit's exploits.  On September 7, 2003, in the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, he confessed to "insider" trading when he bought Ford Motor stock because he thinks the new Mustang will be a winner.  Why does he think that?  Well, because he's a car guy, that's why.  He talks to car people.  It's his job.  He dishes the inside dope on Detroit.  Which makes him an "insider."  Did Ed Wallace do something illegal?  Apparently, he didn't think so.  Those ironic quotation squiggles around the word "insider" are his.  Most folks would think that he's just doing something called "research."

Politicians are the biggest insider traders of all.  Of course, they never refer to what they do as insider trading.  They use colorful catchphrases like "logrolling" and "vote trading" and "arm-twisting" and "pork-barrel."  They're conducted through "good-old-boy networks" in "smoke-filled rooms" behind closed doors, beyond the purview of the public.

Fortunately for us all, "networking" and "families helping each other" and "being friendly" and "research" are not illegal activities in Texas.

Or are they?

Let's pause a moment and consider this sentence from an August 31, 2003 Star-Telegram article: "Texas lawmakers filed more than 5,700 pieces of legislation during the 78th regular session; 1,334 of them became law."

Do Texans know what these 1,334 laws are about?  Are we intimately familiar with every nit and nuance of the 1,621 bills passed in 2002?  What about the 1,000-plus bills that became law in 1999?

Maybe we're all criminals.  Maybe we're all guilty of being insider traitors to the legal system.  So, just to be safe …

Disclaimer: all people and events in this article are fictitious (except Ed Wallace, who's real.)  Any similarity between these activities and a free, libertarian society are purely coincidental.  (Ed, you're on your own.)