Yep, you heard that right. It is actually illegal under the Securities and Exchange act of 1933 for you to invest in any private SEC registered investment if you're not already rich. This by the way is where some of the best returns are, not the public markets which are already watered down.
The law wss formed under the guise of protecting the rubes, the idea being that they were too stupid to understand money but wealthy people were more sophisticated. They literally use that term “sophisticated investor” to describe someone wealthy enough to invest in private opportunities. The truth however was that it was a way to keep the scrappers out of the private investment area, thus reducing capital flow to such investments and artificially propping up ROI (return on investment) to much higher levels than you would see were it a true free market system that anyone could invest in.
This relates directly to ensuring that you stay poor, tethered to that job you hate and never being able to break that cycle, limited to the scraps that public markets throw at you in which you think the 7.5% historical market average is a good annual return..its not.
Case in point: Back in the early 90s i worked for a commercial real estate acquisition and development company. They had just gotten billions in institutional investor funding (think endowments, pension funds and the like) and were buying up office buildings, malls and more around Los Angeles for nickels and dimes on the dollar after the big real estate crash that hit a couple years prior.
I was a financial analyst for what was essentially a fairly small company that was about to take off like a rocket. I knew the numbers better than anyone I was as sophisticated with regard to the business and the investments as anyone. I had managed to save up $10k so I went to the president of the company and said I wanted to put my money in the investment fund. He said great. A few weeks later they came back having spoken to the lawyers and said it would be against the law for me to invest because I didn't meet the definition of a “sophisticated investor ” according to SEC rules which at that time 30 years ago meant I'd have to show a net worth of at least $1m or an income of at least $200k every year for at least rhe last 3 consecutive years. I kept working there for a few more years scraping by at my $28k a year salary.
Had I been allowed to invest my $10k would have been worth $750k 10 years later. Today it would be worth nearly $5m. The poor stay poor in the United States BY LAW. Everyone has dreams of investing in Google, Facebook or Tesla before they went public and making millions or billions but guess what? If you weren't already rich or an officer of one of those companies, you wouldn't have been allowed to invest. So much for your American dreams. Now quit dreaming and get back to work you poor scrapper slaves!