The Forgotten Right of All Americans

We Americans are proud–and rightly so–of our success, our freedom, our innovation and of our form of government. We hold individual rights as inviolate and to be protected at all costs.

Yet, we seem to have forgotten one of our rights recently: The Right to FAIL.

Among all the clamor of the supposed market crisis, I keep seeing a common thread…the thread of people seeking to evade the responsibility of their actions (or lack thereof).

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are just the tip of the iceberg. With investment houses going sour and mega-insurance firms looking unstable, I’m left wondering: “Who hired these idiots?”

The Democrats are racing to every nearby soapbox to scream out their demands for more financial market regulations, more supposed oversight and tighter controls… all in the name of protecting investors. Protect them from what? Bad investments? Isn’t that the right and proper risk of investing– that you may lose EVERYTHING due to a bad choice or two? Those without the stomach for it should not get into volatile markets; they should go buy CDs and count their lucky stars.

Regulation is UNNECESSARY! Want regulation of the market? Here it is: BADLY RUN COMPANIES GO BANKRUPT and thus their incompetence is removed from the marketplace so no more investors will suffer their bad advice. What about the poor little investors who lost their money? Tough noogies! That’s the nature of a market: invest without proper research and oversight and risk losing everything.

Sure, we can all feel sympathy for the folks whose 401k managers made bad choices– but we should hold the managers accountable for bad choices or incompetence, not seek to evade the results. We should be CAREFUL when selecting financial advisors and look at experience, market knowledge… In short, we should take responsibility for our choices, investment and otherwise.

Americans have the right to succeed and prosper, but they also have the right to fail and go bankrupt if they make bad choices–and no political machine can stop the fallout, no matter how much they try. All the Democrats are seeking to do is to spread the pain to ALL of us– but that’s what we get for allowing leftist economic theory into our Congress.

Take responsbility for your investments (and those you hire to manage them for you) and take responsibility for who gets elected. Its NOT enough to say, “Well, I voted for ______, not this guy!”

Take responsibility for yourself–that’s only “change” we need.

Your Choice: A Year or A Decade

The chickens are coming home to roost. The bad choices and all the living beyond our means are about to settle in a new reality–one where the market holds us all accountable for those bad choices.

From the people who bought homes far beyond their means to the folks who thought it was ok to keep refinancing over and over again to get every dime of the housing price bubble into their pocket. From the people who saw credit cards as if they were cash to the credit card companies who think its ok to charge ridiculous interest rates and to mislead borrowers.

Alas, both Presidential candidates are on board with ideas that will lead to a DECADE of pain instead of a year or so. If we let all these poorly run companies fail, sure it would be painful–but the pain will pass quickly. By propping up a FAILED system of intervention and Big Government, we will elongate our pain just as FDR did when his supposed New Deal drastically lengthened the Great Depression.

Make no mistake: Depression is caused by GOVERNMENT meddling in the economy. Recessions are part of a normal business cycle and represent market corrections to bad choices. The point is that private companies cannot make enough bad decisions at the same time to cause a Depression. Only through GOVERNMENT regulation can enough companies be FORCED to go down the same wrong path at the same time.

The answer is simple: Tell your elected officials to STAY OUT OF IT and let the market correct itself. Thankfully, the market doesn’t really care about your politics–it cares about value and substance. If a company becomes a useless empty shell with no real value (i.e., Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) through government intervention, the market knows better than to go there.

As I’ve said before and I’ll say again, if you play in the market you’ve agreed to the risk of investing. Don’t whine when your 401k goes down in value because you failed to research the companies you chose for investment. The information is out there: read it. And if its not there, act like an adult and accept the consequences of choosing an investment that went downhill.