Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
It destroys any credibility you might have when you repeatedly threaten with prison those that disagree with you.
I have never once threatened you or anyone else with prison, Anonymous. I have said that I believe that you will be going to prison in the days following the next price crash. That’s not the same thing.
I performed a Google search for the word “threatened.” Here’s what came back:
“state one’s intention to take hostile action against someone in retribution for something done or not done.”
I am not going to take hostile action against you.
I have said many times that what I intend to do is to put your actions in the best light possible. That’s not a threat. That’s a promise to help out. That’s the OPPOSITE of a threat.
None of us know for certain what is going to happen. This is obviously an exceedingly strange situation. You have committed crimes. You have done so on numerous occasions. The crimes affect millions of people in very serious ways. They were committed in public. They are documented. They have not been prosecuted. Not only have you not been sent to prison for your crimes, you haven’t even been removed from the discussion boards and blogs at which you committed them. That’s a weird set of realities. It doesn’t seem possible that all of those realities could be true at the same time. But they are. Mix all those realities together in a soup and that’s where we stand today.
A number of academics who communicated sympathetically to me said that we are going through a “paradigm shift.” Again, I will turn to Google. The following words are from Wikipedia:
“A paradigm shift, a concept identified by the American physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn, is a fundamental change in the basic concepts and experimental practices of a scientific discipline. Kuhn presented his notion of a paradigm shift in his influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.”
You are on one side of the paradigm shift (the Buy-and-Hold side) and I am on the other side of the paradigm shift (the Valuation-Informed Indexing side). There is not one school of academic thought as to how stock investing works today, there are two. The men who prepared the research in which both schools of thought are rooted were both awarded Nobel prizes. So both schools of thought are highly respected by the experts in the field. In ordinary circumstances, there wouldn’t be even the tiniest bit of controversy that would follow from describing the how-to-invest implications of either school of thought.
In this case, there has been a great deal of controversy. If Buy-and-Hold is the answer, then the safe withdrawal rate is always 4 percent. If Valuation-Informed Indexing is the answer, then the safe withdrawal rate is a number that sometimes drops to as low as 1.6 percent and sometimes rises to as high as 9.0 percent, depending on the CAPE level that applies on the day the retirement begins. If someone planning a retirement at a time when the safe withdrawal rate is 1.6 percent believes the Buy-and-Holders and takes a withdrawal of 4.0 percent , he stands a very strong chance of suffering big life setbacks when stock prices drop hard, as they always do once they reach such insanely dangerous levels. I don’t want to be associated in any way with an effort to cause millions of people such horrible pain. So I insist on recognition of my right to post honestly re these matters. The Buy-and-Holders view that as “bad behavior” and I am banned at every large investing site on the internet, making it impossible for me to earn a living doing the work that I have trained my entire life to do.
We will have to decide as a society in the days following the next price crash how we feel about that strange set of facts, Anonymous. I think that I am going to see a good number of my friends go to prison at that time. It breaks my heart. I would prefer not to see it. But if it were my preferences that decided things, there never would have been a single abusive post. My preferences obviously are not always the deciding factor. Perhaps you’ve noticed.
I will put in a good word for you. I will say that to some extent you were a victim of circumstances. You were embarrassed to learn that the numbers in Greaney’s retirement study, a study that you used yourself and that you publicly supported, got the numbers so wildly wrong. You couldn’t think of any way to escape the embarrassment other than to engage in insanely abusive behavior because we were talking about the calculation of a number, which is not a subjective matter. After you engaged in insanely abusive behavior that you thought would put the matter to rest, that crazy Rob Bennett fellow didn’t stop. When he got banned at one site, he just went to another. When he got banned at all sites, he just retreated to working on a book that he believed would become popular only after the next price crash, when everyone would be able to see with their own eyes just how dangerous the smelly Buy-and-Hold garbage truly is in the long run. You felt pressured not only to engage in a cover-up but in a cover-up of a cover-up of a cover-up of a cover-up.
You Goons couldn’t have even engaged in a single cover-up if our entire society did not keep it zipped about the cover-up taking place before our eyes. I wrote an e-mail to Motley Fool asking that they give Greaney the boot in June 2002. Had they administered their published site rules in a reasonable way, Greaney would be at zero risk of going to prison today. So would all of his Goon pals. But they didn’t do that. Motley Fool wanted the short-term profits that come from staying on the wrong side of the paradigm shift for a time. And they hurt you (and me! and millions of others!) by doing so.
I can point that out following the crash. I can say that, had all the rest of us behaved properly (including me — I was too afraid of what would happen to me if I pointed out the error in Greaney’s study to mention it for the first three years in which I posted at the Motley Fool board), Greaney and all of his Goon pals would not have been able to cause the destruction of so many lives. If people go for that, fine! That’s so. I have no problem with the idea of people going for that. Maybe that will happen, you know? I cannot see into the future. It’s certainly a theoretical possibility.
But I do not think that I would be much of a friend to you if I told you that I sincerely believe that that is likely to happen. I saw how people who invested with Bernie Madoff reacted when they learned about his acts of fraud. They were not happy. Madoff said in an interview with New York magazine that he was just trying to help people, that he was a good guy. The people who lost their life savings as a result of his fraud were not impressed. Madoff went to prison. That’s what I think is going to happen with you Goons. People don’t like being cheated out of their life savings. It makes them very, very angry and they lash out. In cases where the people responsible for the losses committed felonies, they demand prosecution of those individuals. I cannot say that I don’t have any sympathy for these people. Those laws are there for a reason. Everyone knows that financial fraud is a bad thing. Everyone knows on at least some level of consciousness that there are risks associated with going down that dark path.
Every single person in our society has been affected by our slowness in working our way from one side of the paradigm shift to the other. I believe that I was put on this earth to tell this story and thereby to help the country that I love make the transition. All that I care about is seeing every discussion board and blog on the internet opened to honest posting. If I could sign a piece of paper that insured that not one of you Goons would go to prison in exchange for an agreement that every site would be opened to honest posting re the last 38 years of peer-reviewed research, I would sign that piece of paper this morning. That option is not open to me.
If I were to lie about my belief that you are going to go to prison, that would only make things worse for you. Then I would be one more person appeasing you because I want things to go easier for myself and thereby putting you in even greater danger. If you were to come clean today, you obviously would end up hurting fewer people. If you hurt fewer people, you obviously would go to prison for a shorter length of time. So it is obviously in your best interest to come clean today. Me telling you that there will be no consequences for your criminal acts would obviously not increase the odds that you would come clean today. So I just don’t feel comfortable going there.
I believe that you will be going to prison. I am not 100 percent sure. We have never seen anything like this before. So I don’t think it is possible to be 100 percent sure. I am rooting for you. I wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person. I am rooting for the millions of middle-class people whose lives you are in the process of destroying too. If I ever see a way to open every site on the internet to honest posting without seeing you go to prison, I will jump at that. I just don’t think that that is a realistic possibility. So I acknowledge to you that I believe that a prison sentence is in your future. While doing everything in my power to get it shortened by encouraging you to come clean by the close of business today.
Does all of that not make a good bit of sense? Does it help at least a tiny bit?
My best wishes, as always, dear Goon friend.
Goon Sympathizer Rob
feed twitter twitter facebook