See: Tax the Hell Out of Wall Street and Give it to Main Street.

Cuban illustrates again how our billionaire caste is split starkly in half, with most of the self-made tech billionaires speaking up for the nation as a shared endeavor, meriting their gratitude and help... while another half seems deeply imbued in tax-resentment solipsism and dreams of oligarchy.  This distinction shows that our troubles are not about left-vs-right... markets and capitalism, which almost always do better under democrats, are among the top victims of neo-feudalism, not the perpetrators. (Though I despair of getting this point across to either my libertarian or liberal friends.)

The notion that markets can benefit from a little ‘slowing friction’ goes back to the Tobin tax, suggested by Nobel Laureate economist James Tobin, originally defined as a tax on spot conversions of one currency into another. The tax is intended to put a penalty on short-term financial round-trip excursions into another currency.  Slowing such transactions to a human pace prevents hysteresis and nonlinear runaway effects and allows all market participants to acquire the knowledge they need for Smithian/Hayekian decision making, instead of favoring a select few.

Whether on currency trades or more generally applied to stocks and securities, this notion of slowing the pace, in order to increase the number of knowing traders, runs counter to the obsession of the school of neo-classical (e.g. supply-side, neoconservative) economics, which claims that utter-fast fluidity of financial markets, favoring the biggest players, will bring capital automatically where it needs to go -- a perverted misreading of Adam Smith that completely severed finance from the creation of goods and services, or any grounding in broad-based competition. The inevitable reduction in the number of knowing players should have set off alarm bells in any non-hypocrite believers in Smith or Hayek; alas it did not. For a reductio-ad-absurdum distillation of neo-classical economics, think the “Galgafrincham B- Ark,” from the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Further note: I think the neo-classical economists almost had the right idea. There is a magic ultimate ingredient that turns markets into thriving, supercharged creativity and wealth generating machines! But it is something other than the poisons we were prescribed by neocons. What benefits an economy and makes a market efficient-fecund is not unleashing boy “genius” bankers to gamble at lightning speed with other peoples savings. Nor is it pouring tax breaks into an oligarchy, praying that THIS time they will actually (according to supply side theory) invest it in plants and equipment.  Nor is the secret ingredient maximal speed of trade or lowered regulation or “zero-friction.”  {notice that all of these just happen to help existing elites to grab lucre by rent-seeking; what a coincidence!}  

No. What is essential -- and Adam Smith and F. Hayek and virtually all sane economists down the line agree with me -- is Maximized Transparency. So that all players in capitalism and politics and society (not just privileged elites) can know enough -- and have time enough -- to make informed decisions.  The lies, obfuscations and concealed identities must stop.  THAT will result in more efficiency and (ironically) even lowered regulation. Indeed, transparency is the only rational alternative that can manage to reduce government involvement in markets, period.

Despite some similarities, there are differences between my approach to the Tobin transaction tax and Mark Cuban’s.  He calls for a levy of 25 cents per share traded.  Ouch. Not gonna happen; won’t pass.

Simpler, and a way to ease it in, would be to levy one hundredth of a percent of the VALUE of each trade.  Or else... more directly justifiable... don’t charge all of the costs of SEC etc to the federal budget. Instead the new transaction fee (not a “tax”) rises or falls based on the current cost of enforcement, regulation and reserves.

Either way, what Cuban strangely never mentions is my chief motive for doing this... a general Tobin Trading Levy would be death to a recent-modern villainy -- coded-reflex cheat-trading by big brokers who gamble and nibble at the margins through billions of tiny, computer-spun micro-trades, taking unfair advantage of both their privileged stock market memberships (no commission) and their quicker access to inside information to detect clients’' buy orders -- thus gaming the system while those buy order are in play!

This reform is obvious... and won't happen.  The Chicago School neo-classicists who caused the collapse still see a trillion efficiency angels dancing on the head of a pin. The pin that popped our economy.