>Additionally, no one has the power to magically set a stock price to be a certain price on a certain date.

but many have the knowledge of which company or industry is about to experience legislation, which they can pass to any of their associates worldwide, who can then buy or short the affected entities and share the profit with the insider. Polymarket is just the idiocracy version of that.

I completely agree insider trading is an issue, especially with the legality of sitting congressmen being able to day trade. But with the exception of elected officials voting for bad bills / policies, the "victim" is whomever loses money on those trade. Its reactive to world events, meaning the world events aren't being changed by the insider trader.

Polymarket is worse as it gives a mechanism for proactively changing the outcome of events to a much more extreme degree, simply because someone can make money on it.

A benign version of this would be NFL employees betting $1million on the color of gatorade in the Superbowl.

An insane version of this would be Trump issuing a single airstrike on Iran after having a friend or family member place a $10M bet on polymarket that pays out $1B. It completely erodes the obligation our government officials have to not act in their self interests.