With Facebook’s shares plummeting after its IPO, it is increasingly becoming clear that in the investment world, the biggest winnings produced by Facebook will largely be enjoyed by the investors that bought pre-IPO stock in the social media company.

Investors who got their first opportunity to buy into Facebook on Friday have lost money now that the stock is down 9% from its IPO price. Mark Zuckerberg will try to squeeze revenues out of his legions of users to build a company worth more than $90 billion, but with no IPO pop the big hype gains for Facebook will probably go to the likes of Goldman Sachs and billionaire Charles “Chase” Coleman’s Tiger Global, which both sold a large chunk of their shares in the IPO for $38 each.

Ezra Klein, who writes for the Washington Post, argued on The Rachel Maddow Show on Friday that to buy Facebook early like Goldman Sachs and Tiger “you had to be rich and well connected like Bono.” Klein went on to argue in a segment that he was particularly proud of that “this is the story of modern inequality in America.”

If the outcome of the Facebook IPO reflects income inequality in America today, however, it is a direct result of federal government intervention. By inserting itself into the marketplace with the well-meaning goal of protecting little-guy investors, the government has created an uneven playing field. As a result, big investors can benefit from what some call "regulatory arbitrage."

In 2002 Congress gave us Sarbanes-Oxley, a federal law that set new standards for publicly-traded companies after the scandals at Enron and WorldCom. Congress might have acted with good intentions, but the result has been hard to deny. Being a public company is now much more expensive and onerous. Since 2002 smaller and emerging U.S. companies have stopped going public. Zuckerberg himself resisted taking Facebook public for a long time. As a result, Facebook’s massive valuation gain took place while it was a private company. Zuckerberg only relented once it became clear his company had too many shareholders to remain private under the rules. He clearly thought being public was a nuisance.

Some people argue that Sarbanes-Oxley is not the reason emerging companies in the U.S. have stopped going public. They say it’s the emergence of hedge fund traders that focus CEOs only on the short-term who have discouraged entrepreneurs from having their companies join the stock market. But the data is clear, before 2002 companies went public; now they do so at a much slower pace. Initial public offerings in the U.S. have dropped to around 100 a year from more than 300 a year between 1980 and 2000. In addition, the fact that Zuckerberg and others like LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman have dealt with the fast-money traders by creating two classes of stock makes it less compelling to argue that a new market dynamic has changed the game for them. So does Jeff Bezos, who has successfully resisted applying a short-term mentality to publicly-traded Amazon.

In addition to Sarbox, changes in Rule 144 governing private stock sales have decreased the “lockup period” in which investors must hold stock from three years down to one. SEC rules still require companies with 500 individual investors to file Sarbox compliant financials with the SEC. All of these laws and rules have mixed together to create a lucrative and lightly-regulated marketplace for shares of hot private companies like Facebook. To play in this arena you need to be an accredited investor like Goldman Sach. Ezra Klein need not apply.

The law of unintended consequences doesn’t stop at the income disparity debate. You could argue that all of this is bad for America because it transfers U.S. made wealth out of the country. In early 2011, when Goldman Sachs invested in Facebook for itself and its clients, it had to change plans and only allow its non-U.S. clients to invest in Facebook because of securities law concerns. Goldman was worried about the SEC’s Regulation D, which does not allow private placements to be the subject of a big promotion. Foreign rules are less strict about this sort of thing. Goldman Sachs sold $1.09 billion of Facebook stock for itself and its clients last week, nearly half the shares the investment bank held. There will be less Facebook money flowing back into the U.S. economy as a result.