Senate Banking Committee Chair Sen. Sherrod Brown has taken on all manner of powerful lobbies and industries over the courts of his career. Now, it seems like he picked his final fight with an effort to enact oversight on cryptocurrency companies.

These in turn poured $40 million into the campaign of his GOP opponent Bernie Moreno, who defeated Brown this week.

The industry has been very active and bipartisan in its efforts to stay unregulated, backing candidates from both parties. This is not to pick on crypto, it’s merely a reminder of its terrible track record as a consumer product (really an unregulated speculative security) that is still relatively new.

Billions of dollars have been wiped out in successive crypto collapses and thus far the industry has failed to prove that it can be trusted to operate transparently or in ways that advance consumer interests. Many coins and exchanges claim that their products are either effectively currency — despite the fact that very few are ever actually utilized for transactions — or something like stocks with some innate backing, despite the fact that there are by and large no assets behind them.

If consumers want to take a risk, they’re free to do so. But they should do so with clear eyes and in at least a somewhat regulated industry. There might be ways that the industry could operate responsibly, but so far it has not been a good idea to let the industry try (and fail) to police itself. Now, some of the voices that had most strongly advocated for additional regulation, like Brown, are out of the picture.

More broadly, a new incoming Trump administration promises a scale-back of regulatory authority and activity, at least in most regards, with functions like immigration enforcement a notable exception. What this means is that, if you think scams and frauds and white collar crime are bad now, who knows what happens when the regs are reduced.

A presidency committed to the dissolution of an administrative state is not going to do much about the avalanches of spam calls and direct messages and AI-generated swill that now plagues most Americans’ online and offline lives.

There’s a lot of money to be made from this relentless scamming. All of the money spent on elections is more like an investment to make sure the gravy train keeps running, to the detriment of the public.

— From Tribune News Service