Although this sounds like a sensible idea, I think it's impossible to prevent insider trading - if you introduce a rule like this, politicians will just find a middle man or work around it in some other way - the corruption schemes getting more elaborate is the last thing you want.
> I think it's impossible to prevent insider trading
Sure. It's impossible to prevent all crime. But that doesn't mean that rules and restrictions around what you can and can't do are useless. The existing rules for prohibiting insider trading when it comes to corporate executives work decently well; we should just expand those to apply to people in Congress (and make it apply to all securities for them).
It won't catch everything, but it will help. A lot.
This is pervasive in China; the politicians kid is the middleman. One child policy, so there's at most one kid -- makes it easy to know who to give the stock tips to.
