You have been given the same advice your whole life, and it is good advice. You cannot beat the market. Do not try. Buy a little of everything, hold it for 30 years, and do not flinch when it falls. It is true. It is also advice given, in part, by 535 people who quietly do not have to take it. In the last week of February 2020, you were told to stay calm. The market was sliding, the virus was still a rumor with a foreign name, and every steady voice said hold the line and think long term. Most of us did. We watched the retirement accounts fall and we held, because holding was the discipline and the discipline was right. That same week, senators of both parties who had sat in a closed briefing on the coming pandemic sold. Millions of dollars in stock, in the days before the drop. The Justice Department opened an investigation and closed it without a single charge. The rules held, because no one had broken them. It was not one strange month six years ago. Last year, 140 members of Congress made more than 14,000 trades worth about $720 million. They do not trade at random. The members who sit on the committees that write the defense budget trade defense contractors. The members who write Medicare and Medicaid policy trade the health insurers who live on those programs. The firms whose fortunes they shape are the firms they own. There is a law meant to stop this. It is called the STOCK Act, and when a member files a trade late, the penalty is $200. Not $200,000. $200, and even that is often waived. In all the years the law has existed, no member of Congress has ever been criminally prosecuted under it. I am not saying this to make you hate them. Hatred is cheap and it fixes nothing. I am saying it because of what we are usually handed to be angry about instead. We are pointed at the neighbor with the stimulus check, the family in line with an EBT card, the student asking to have a loan forgiven. We are taught to look sideways and down, at people who have less than we do, and to believe they are the reason the arithmetic no longer works. The edge that actually moved the money was never standing beside you in that line. It sat in a room you were not allowed to enter. Let me be careful, because this is the part that matters. There is nothing wrong with being rich. A person who starts a company, carries the risk, and builds and sells the thing is the country working as promised, and we should want more of them, not fewer. The objection here is narrow. It is a portfolio built out of a security clearance. An advantage that arrives with the seat instead of the work. We know it can be fixed, because it has been. When two Federal Reserve officials were found trading through the same 2020 crisis they were managing, they were gone within weeks, and the Fed barred its officials from trading individual stocks at all. An institution decided its credibility was worth more than its portfolios. Congress looked at the same conflict this month. The House passed a bill to ban the practice and gave it the name you wanted to hear. It lets every member keep the stock they already hold. It lets them keep buying more with the dividends. It exempts the presidency and the vice presidency. Half of Congress owns individual stock, and under this ban, half of Congress keeps it. Meanwhile the one retirement plan they manage on your behalf, the one you pay into with every paycheck, is set to fall short in 2032, 6 years from now, and to cut benefits by about 22 percent when it does. They have known for 30 years. They have not agreed on a repair. They have been more attentive to their own. They will hear the next briefing before you do. We can keep score of which party's list is longer. Or we can notice that both lists exist, and that the only person in this story who was told to hold was the one who could not afford to lose. He held. He was told that was the honest thing to do. It was.