Are Stock Market Investors Selfish, Greedy, Unpatriotic?
(“Because he who dies with the most stuff, wins”)
Go to most stock brokers today and the advice will be pretty consistent. Making as much money as possible is the only thing that matters. All else be damned, including cultural values and patriotism. “You can’t take an expensive vacation to Hawaii or buy that new Escalade with profitless sentiment,” they’ll tell you.
The going broker advice today is to invest in companies and mutual funds that are heavily into the successful Asian marketplace. You’ve probably already guessed which countries apply. Almost all of them. This is where the money is. American companies and manufacturing jobs are relocating overseas. Why? It’s also a place where cheap labor, a strong work ethic, and homogeneous racial cultures can be found.
Meanwhile, poorer Americans (and Europeans) prefer the welfare state, bringing in dirt-poor immigrants to do the less desirable work. Middle-class worker drones find that their meager dollars are stretched further by consuming as much cheap food and budget-priced manufactured goods as possible. And the stock “player” well-off will sell their souls to the devil to accumulate more wealth.
Manufacturing jobs are largely gone now, unemployment is high, and American capital is shrinking. As an investor, my only goal is to do what’s best for me. Actually, this has been doing on for some time now, and George Soros seems typical.
Wes Vernon’s 2001 article “Soros: Patriotism Ends at the Stock Market” reminds us that that greed and patriotism are often at odds: “A major uproar may be coming in the halls of Congress over top-dollar investors who are betting against the economy and helping to push the market down. One such investor is noted financier George Soros, a major backer of Bill and Hillary Clinton. This financial attack by short-sellers like Soros is going on even as small investors are sinking their meager cash reserves into the American economy to help their country in time of war.”
Has much changed in the intervening years? Should we naively believe that all the fat cats are automatically “job creators” who will magically transform the American economy? And if so, job creators where?
