Comment Text:
The CFTC's ANPRM asks broad questions about how to regulate prediction markets. Based on this research, a public comment grounded in legal analysis, documented evidence, and Christian ethical principles should advance several key positions.
First, the Commission should exercise its authority under Section 5c(c)(5)(C)(vi) to determine that contracts involving human death, military operations, terrorism, assassination, nuclear weapons, and government policy outcomes — where insiders can profit from classified or nonpublic information — are "contrary to the public interest." The statutory authority exists. The documented harms demand it.
Second, the Commission should adopt a robust definition of "public interest" that incorporates not only hedging and price-basing utility but also the moral costs of commodifying human suffering, the incentive corruption created when financial instruments reward catastrophe, and the demonstrated risks to national security, democratic integrity, and journalistic freedom.
Third, the Commission should recognize that its exclusive jurisdiction claim carries a corresponding responsibility. If the CFTC asserts that states cannot regulate prediction markets as gambling, then the CFTC itself must provide equivalent consumer protections — including responsible gambling safeguards, age restrictions, position limits, and robust insider trading enforcement. An agency that has lost 20% of its staff and operates as a one-commissioner body cannot credibly claim both exclusive jurisdiction and deregulatory posture simultaneously.
Fourth, sports event contracts that function identically to sports wagers should not receive regulatory arbitrage advantages over state-regulated gambling — the very outcome Congress expressly intended to prevent, as the Feinstein-Lincoln colloquy makes clear.
Fifth, the Commission should adopt comprehensive insider trading rules for prediction markets, with particular attention to contracts where government officials, military personnel, and their associates possess material nonpublic information about outcomes they can influence.
Sixth, the CFTC should hear from the Christian community that the commodification of human life and death through financial instruments violates principles of human dignity, stewardship, and love of neighbor that have animated Western moral reasoning for millennia. The Westminster Larger Catechism's condemnation of "wasteful gaming" under the Eighth Commandment, the biblical warnings against covetousness and unjust gain, and the doctrine of the imago Dei all speak with one voice: human beings and human events are not proper objects of financial speculation. When someone profits from predicting the timing of a military strike that kills people, or from the assassination of a world leader, the moral fabric of a society is torn in ways that no amount of "information aggregation" can repair.
