> As a holder of shares in a company for retirement, why would I want to in any way enable short sellers to artificially drive the price of those shares into the ground, or even bankrupt the company?
If the price is depressed, everyone benefits from it. If you can't benefit from it (eg. the price is depressed, the short seller sold it to some hedge fund, and the price returned to normal) then there's no impact. Which one is it?
So you can buy more shares on sale, clearly.