Tess,
While I concurr with you that some private collectors being brought into the formula sounds good ... we end up with the situation where some of the medals of major military personas have left the country - gone for good so to speak... and that is a travesty in itself.... isn't it?
And some medals also come back to the country through the actions of individual collectors. Those medals which did leave the country did so only because those who could have prevented it for the reasons you might ascribe to be proper, failed to do so at the time. How or why this happened in individual cases might vary, but an underlying cause is most likely the lack of our society's appreciation for historical artifacts at a widely understood individual level. Without such a sense of social responsibility, medals go to the collector's market, to collectors who preserve and treasure that which a family no longer cares enough for to preserve, or to ensure its preservation in a museum or other institution. As mentioned, collectors also preserve the memory of servicemen whose legacy might otherwise be a set of medals collecting dust in a storeroom, never to see the light of day again.
There may be a travesty occuring, but it has not been wrought by the collectors. And the greater travesty which has been avoided is the discarding of medals without "value" to uncaring descendants if collectors were prevented from acquiring them.
I would suggest that any objective analysis would show that it's too late to try and enact laws to outlaw their sale. No doubt such a political manoeuvre would be as effective as the gun registry, and with even less social imperative to try and enforce it.
