Rob: “We All Have Goonishness Within Us.” Buy-and-Hold Goon Response: “Then Why Call Someone a Goon? It Is Like Starting Out a Post Referring to People as Breathing Human Beings.”

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

“We all have goonishness within us.”

Then why call someone a goon. It is like starting out a post referring to people as breathing human-beings. Instead, what you are doing is immediately denigrating someone with a label. Same thing with the allegations of criminal acts. You are immediately attacking someone without offering up one bit of proof. There is no place for this kind of bad behavior.

Financial fraud is a crime. Advancing threats of physical violence is a crime. Engaging in acts of extortion is a crime. Buy-and-Hold would have passed from the scene many years ago is it were not for our collective tolerance of these crimes. The reason why we tolerate these crimes is that we all have a soft spot in our hearts for Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold investment strategies. We all want something for nothing. We all want to believe that our irrational exuberance gains are real and can be counted when we are determining whether we have accumulated enough assets to be able to retire safely.

It is not possible to speak intelligently about stock investing in the year 2021 without making reference to these matters. When the Buy-and-Holders prohibit discussion of the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research, what they are really doing is prohibiting rational discussion of this critically important subject. The ordinary thing would have been that, as soon as Shiller published his Nobel-prize-winning research, we would have engaged in extensive discussion of its many far-reaching implications at every site on the internet.

If you don’t explain why that hasn’t happened, you are not being helpful. It is the criminal behavior of you Goons that has stopped that from happening. Many people have expressed a desire to hear the true story on safe withdrawal rates and on scores of other critically important investment-related topics. But the death threats and the acts of extortion scare people and so you Goons have been able to suppress rational discussion for 19 years now. Leave out that part of the story and you are not telling the real story.

Rob