Get ahead of regulation

It’s easy to make money in this market. We’d better get in before they pass a law against it.
—Joseph P. Kennedy

quoted in David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), ch. 12

A longer excerpt:

"It’s easy to make money in this market," the canny speculator Joseph P. Kennedy had confided to a partner in the palmy days of the 1920s. "We’d better get in before they pass a law against it." The New Deal did pass a law against it, then assigned Joseph P. Kennedy to implement that law, a choice often compared to putting the fox in the henhouse or setting a thief to catch a thief. In 1934 Kennedy became the first chairman of the new Securities Exchange Commission (SEC), one of just four new regulatory bodies established by the New Deal.

Id. (citing Michael R. Beschloss, Kennedy and Roosevelt: An Uneasy Alliance (New York: Norton, 1980), 60)