And lockdowns were instituted in 2020, in response to the spread of the coronavirus. They have been found to have caused something on the order of 141 times more damage than they mitigated:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13571516.2021.19...

The idea that we ought to impose blanket restrictions on millions of people, and thereby sacrifice their liberty, in the name of safety, is fundamentally misguided in my opinion, and certain goes against the core principles of liberal society. Liberal democracies have to find more rights-respecting ways to combat financial crime.

Yes we know preemptively restricting financial interaction reduces some forms of financial harm, but what kind of damage does it do to society, when the only business entities capable of directly soliciting the public for capital, are those with revenues of over $100 million a year? What does that do to income inequality?

I don't like people promising the moon to hype up speculative investments, but there are non-government solutions to this, like reputation markets.

In fact we saw these non-government solutions working already: token investors in 2018, at the end of the brief period of reprieve from SEC restrictions, between 2016 and 2018, were unrecognizable from those that were giving a website with a white paper $40 million worth of cryptocurrency in 2016. This transformation occurred completely independently from any regulatory action. The collective intelligence of the market increased from hard-won lessons in the need to do due diligence, and the emergence of numerous sites for rating token sales (mind you, there was still a lot of room improvement in the curation market when the token sale experiment was shut down by the SEC. One promising avenue was Vitalik Buterin's proposal for DAICOs: https://ethresear.ch/t/explanation-of-daicos/465 which the market did not survive long enough to test).

Regulations can obviously address some of these problems too, but any restriction on how consenting parties choose to interact is going to have massive unintended consequences, and in my estimation the unintended consequences do much more harm than what's alleviated by the regulations.

Also worth mentioning is that the regulations that the SEC imposed on token sales went far beyond prohibiting issuers from promising big gains. They micromanaged how offerings were conducted, with inflexible cookie cutter rules that inhibit innovation and make the entire market dependent on a centralized gatekeeper, which is a monopolistic and fragile situation prone to systemic failures. One significant effect of this was that they eliminated the entire retail market's access to the early stage venture capital market.

It's obvious to me that a free society should not tolerate this level of control being exerted on how people engage in voluntary interactions with other consenting adults.

>>The fact that what's being sold are numbers generated on a computer is not the most relevant factor, and does not not warrant a different treatment than say titles of Florida swamp land.

The fact that an investment offer required having a title to a swamp in the 1930s made it so it was less evident how illiberal laws that the SEC enforces stifle society. Now that any one with a computer can create digital art and offer it up as an investment on a programmatic contract system makes it clear that the laws passed in the 1930s, if maintained, are going to require increasingly draconian intrusions into private interaction to enforce. Similar to how if we as a society tried to continue enforcing obscenity laws into the internet age: effective enforcement would have required prohibiting public access to strong encryption, and heavy handed treatment of those found flouting the law, to make an example out of them for every one else.