A question for Pelosi: Why are members of Congress allowed to trade stocks?

In the world many of us would like to see, we’d admire public servants of all kinds for their dedication to the country. Yet we’d also acknowledge that having a government that operates smoothly and free of corruption requires those public servants to accept some conditions on their employment they might not tolerate if they were in the private sector.

Most of the time, that’s how things do work. Members of Congress, for instance, have to file financial disclosures that are made public, which you don’t have to do if...