How is this for corruption?

What is it like to be a member of Congress? Kyle Smith reports at Forbes,

one thing you can do as a member is study pending legislation and regulatory changes, call up your broker and instruct him to trade on that nonpublic information. Do this as often as you want; you will suffer no penalty. There is no limit to how much money you can earn on insider trading in the House or Senate. Lawmakers and their staffers are specifically exempted.

As you might expect, those who work in the hallowed halls are not shy about availing themselves of the opportunity. A Wall Street Journal analysis published more than six months ago that has thus far provoked no particular sense of shame on Capitol Hill found that at least 72 Congressional aides in both parties had recently traded shares of companies that their bosses helped regulate. In 2009, while Senate Banking Committee member Mike Crapo, a Republican from Idaho, was involved in discussing “stress tests” on banks such as Bank of America, his aide Karen Brown traded the company’s stock on several occasions in the weeks before May 7, 2009 — when BofA surged thanks to a press release on its stress-test result, assuring Ms. Brown a nifty profit.

…Last week a study of some 16,000 stock transactions carried out by House members was published in the journal Business and Politics. This detailed analysis showed that the investment portfolios of House members beat the market by about six points a year. (Democrats did especially well, outperforming by some nine points a year, while Republicans topped the average investor by only two percent annually.) Senators apparently do even better: “their portfolios show some of the highest excess returns ever recorded over a long period of time, significantly outperforming even hedge fund managers,” noted the journal, citing a previously published study.

In what must be treated as more of a practical joke than a serious effort at legislation, every so often a group of lawmakers typically numbering in the high single digits proposes that Congress be subjected to the same insider-trading laws as you or me. Said proposal is always swiftly ignored — it has yet to reach the House floor and hasn’t even been bandied in the Senate. Then everyone goes out to their Spartan lunches of baloney and Cheez Curls, comfortable in the knowledge that they have improved on the Golden Rule: He who makes the rules pockets the gold.

Read more here.