“I Look Forward to Enjoying a Few Cold Ones With You When We Both Make It to the Other Side of The Big Black Mountain and Are Laughing Together About the Stuff That Went Down in the Old Days.”

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:

The John Greaney issue has also been explained to you thousands of times as well.

You say you want a “discussion”. Far from it. You want to make your comments and then for people to say “We agree with you, Rob”. The problem is that people did not agree with you, so you kept repeating the same things. Eventually, people grew tired of it, and your behavior in how you handled it, so they had no choice but to ban you.

I want the people who agree with me to say “I agree with you, Rob.” And I want the people who do not agree with me to say “I do not agree with you, Rob.” And I want the people in the middle to say “I agree with you in part and I disagree with you in part, Rob.”

The problem is that the Buy-and-Holders outnumber the Valuation-Informed Indexers by 10 to 1. So they feel that they can get away with insanely abusive behavior, including in some cases criminal behavior. Those in the 10 percent object from time to time. But in general people do not like to expose themselves to the absolutely insane stuff (like death threats). So lots of people who would never engage in the sorts of behavior that we see from you Goons TOLERATE that behavior when they see you engage in it. And civil, reasoned discussion becomes impossible.

Our laws against financial fraud and against extortion and against threats of physical violence serve an important purpose. So long as those laws are respected, there are ways for new ideas to come on the scene and to gradually over time become more popular and eventually to replace the old ideas. We have not seen that happen in the 38 years since Shiller published his “revolutionary” (his word) Nobel-prize-winning research findings showing that valuations affect long-term returns. That has hurt all of us. It is a national tragedy. It is a shame.

The question that remains on the table is — When millions of people lose more than 50 percent of their life savings, will there be enough people who work up the courage to stand up to you Goons and to thereby launch the national debate that in an ideal world would have been launched 38 years ago? I think that that is how this will play out. I think that we are a good people and I think that, when the chips are down, we will do the right thing. There’s a big difference between knowing as a theoretical matter that Buy-and-Hold is a big pile of smelly garbage and seeing in a real-world sense what it has done to all your friends and neighbors and co-workers and fellow community members.

So I believe that this story will have a happy ending. And I believe that Shiller’s huge leap forward will be so liberating and enriching for all of us that we will in not too much time put our memories of the ugly stuff behind us. That stuff doesn’t amount to much in the grand scheme of things compared to the thousands of life-affirming insights into how stock investing works that we will all be able to mine together once we give ourselves permission to talk honestly about this stuff (not just in published rules but in a practical, real-world sense too).

We’ll see, you know?

I could be wrong. I thought that Greaney’s Campaign of Terror against us would last all of two days, three days tops, before we would pull together to bring it to a full and complete stop. I think it would be fair to say that the joke turned out to be on me re that one. But I believe that the story will have a happy ending all the same. We are all just going to have to wait to see how things play out in the days following the next price crash to know for certain.

I wish you the best of luck with it, Anonymous. I look forward to enjoying a few cold ones with you when we both make it to the other side of The Big Black Mountain and are laughing together about the stuff that went down in the old days. I wouldn’t be too surprised if we ended up being on the same side at that time, you know? But we are just going to have to wait a bit to find out for sure.

My best wishes.

Goon Pal Rob