Japan just convened actual lawmakers to figure out what to do about Pokémon cards. The country that invented Pikachu had to hold a meeting because cardboard got too expensive. And the part that should sting for them: they sat in that room and were told a company in California decides what their national treasure is worth. Imagine creating Charizard and finding out a grading company in Santa Ana sets the price. That's the geopolitical version of your wife naming her boyfriend's new dog after you.
Meanwhile there's already a bill sitting in the Senate that would drag art dealers, advisors, galleries, auction houses, and anybody acting as a middleman under Bank Secrecy Act reporting the second a piece clears ten grand. Ten thousand dollars. That's a decent Kobe rookie and one bad decision at midnight. Nobody has to write a Pokémon law. They just widen one definition and half the guys reading this become financial institutions with compliance obligations, which is a very funny thing to say about people who store inventory in a shoebox under a futon.
Nobody in that building has read a piece of legislation in their life, and that includes the ones with six-figure inventory in the case.
And where is the hobby during all of this? Getting its financial guidance from a 24-year-old with a ring light who bought a mic six weeks ago and now has opinions about market cycles. Yes, I hear it, I'm a guy with a YouTube channel telling you not to listen to guys with YouTube channels. The difference is I'm telling you to go read the bill. The rest of the weekend is spent at a card show paying full comp to a dealer who has been quoting the same price since the peak, standing in a convention center that smells like nacho cheese and divorce, nodding along while a man in a Tommy Bahama shirt explains that it's a floor now. Nobody in that building has read a piece of legislation in their life, and that includes the ones with six-figure inventory in the case.
So ask the obvious question. If Japan is doing this to Pokémon because the cards started behaving like assets, what happens over here, where sports cards have been behaving like assets for years, where single cards clear seven figures, where you can buy a fractional share of a Mantle like it's a stock, and where one company holds nearly every license in the sport? That's not a hobby anymore, that's a market with a chokepoint, and markets with chokepoints get noticed. That rule already got written once, got withdrawn, and is sitting in a drawer waiting on the next administration. Regulation in this country is a ratchet, not a switch. When they open that drawer, the art world will have six lobbyists in linen suits in the room and the hobby will have nobody, because our idea of political organizing is a shirtless guy screaming about allocation on a livestream at 2 a.m. We were never going to be the target. We're just standing next to it.