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 have only your word that Wade ever said that, or ever even mentioned VII by name. He certainly says nothing of the kind today. In fact, to you, he says nothing at all.

Wade will be called to testify at your trial, Anonymous. I have a funny feeling that he will testify honestly when he is put under oath. Then the members of your jury will determine the length of your prison sentence. That’s how our system works.

I hope that sounds good to you.

Rob

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

No, that’s what IT people call a solution in search of a problem. Everyone can already post honestly. Everyone, that is, with the tiny exception of that handful of cranks who absolutely will not behave in a civil manner. Cranks have always been shunned, and always will be shunned, and rightly so.

Just for clarity, here is the first part of the Wikipedia entry for “cranks”:

“Crank is a pejorative term used for a person who holds an unshakable belief that most of his or her contemporaries consider to be false. A crank belief is so wildly at variance with those commonly held as to be considered ludicrous. Cranks characteristically dismiss all evidence or arguments which contradict their own unconventional beliefs, making any rational debate a futile task and rendering them impervious to facts, evidence, and rational inference.”

I especially like that last sentence. Bullseye. They don’t come any more futile and impervious than you.

Please mark me down as believing that the crank who was recently awarded the Nobel prize in Economics might be on to something.

Rob

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

“my job is one of the most important jobs in the United States, perhaps the biggest of all.”

Does anyone else, including your wife, agree with that statement?

I am going to add a little bit to that response.

The click experiences come at different times for different people. I have had more click experiences because I have been working it so hard and for so long. It’s not reasonable to expect everyone who was exposed to the discussion to have had the same number of click experiences. If the discussions continued, more and more would have those click experiences over time. But it takes a good bit of time for some insights to hit and different sorts of insights hit at different times for different people.

This is why it is so critical that fully honest posting be permitted at every site. I didn’t know Wade Pfau when this started. So, if I had not soldiered on through a good number of years of abuse before meeting him, I would have missed out on all of his insights. And so would the rest of the world because Wade never would have looked into these questions if he hadn’t learned about my work at the Bogleheads Forum.

Learning new things is a process of discovery. And you just never know what sort of person is going to say things in just the right way to cause a click experience for you. Say that Wade had been awarded a Nobel prize for the research that he co-authored with me a number of years back. Other academic researchers would have noticed that and that would have caused them to develop an interest in exploring new angles of the Valuation-Informed Indexing concept. So today we would all be benefiting not only from Shiller’s insights and from my insights and from Wade’s insights but also from the insights of these other academic researchers who we cannot even name today because we elected to shut down honest posting all across the internet.

There is HUGE leverage in opening every site to honest posting. The thing grows and grows and grows as more people get involved trying to further develop the concept. That’s a big part of what makes my work so important. It is not just that I will be able to spread the word re the hundreds of powerful insights that I have developed over the past 15 years. It is that we will be getting hundreds and hundreds of other smart people involved and those people too will be generating hundreds of powerful insights and thereby helping us all out.

Your abusive posting is like a dam that has been holding up the flood of knowledge of how stock investing works for 15 years now. I am trying to knock a hole in that damn. Once we knock a hole in the dam, we are going to see all kinds of wonderful stuff that we cannot even imagine today. Life is just going to keep getting better and better and better for all of us for many years into the future.

This is our system. This is how freedom works for all of us. This is what the United States is all about — progress for all through the exercise of freedom. This is why I love my country.

Deep in your hearts, I feel confident that you Goons have some affinity for the freedom concept and the progress concept and the research concept although you of course will vehemently deny that this is the case in the safe-withdrawal-rate realm. I believe that you will change your tune following the crash, when the appeal of the pure Get Rich Quick approach will quickly evaporate into thin air.

Rob

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

“There’s not one thing in this world that can be bought with money that I want and do not have.”

Then why is your wife scared about money? Maybe she wants to buy things that you don’t care about. College tuition for the boys, perhaps.

The question that you are asking goes to the heart of all this, Anonymous.

Why do fat people eat too many cookies? Why do smokers smoke? Why do drinkers drink? We do we watch too much television and engage in too little exercise? Why do young people engage in unprotected sex with partners whom they don’t even like very much?

Life is better when you take a long-term perspective. But we are vulnerable creatures always on the look-out for some short-term relief. Buy-and-Hold offers huge amounts of short-term relief. Stocks are today priced at two times fair value. It makes people feel good to believe that they are twice as far along in the job of achieving financial independence as they really are. It hurts them in the long run to fall for the Buy-and-Hold lies. You cannot plan effectively for your future when you have no idea how much in the way of assets you possess today. Buy-and-Hold is a disaster, like eating too many cookies is a disaster or like drinking too much wine is a disaster or like picking up too many strangers in bars is a disaster.

But we humans like our little disasters, don’t we? If you are looking for a quick way to turn a buck, you are better getting into the cookie-selling business than getting into the giving-sound-nutritional-advice business. So it is in the investing realm as well. Buy-and-Hold beats Valuation-Informed Indexing as a marketing proposition. By a country mile.

I got into this because I was studying what it takes to achieve financial freedom early in life. Up until age 35, I did not save money. I had a few thousand in a checking account and spent the rest of whatever came in. I became excited when I learned the power of saving effectively. It wasn’t about doing what the experts said and being a goody goody and all this garbage. It was about opening up possibilities for my life that would not exist if I did not learn to save effectively. Once that click experience went off for me in the saving realm, I became open to having similar click experiences in other areas. The day came when I had a click experience in the investing area. Failing to consider price when buying stocks does just as much to set back your hopes of achieving what you want to achieve with your life as failing to pay close attention to long-term value propositions on the spending/saving side. So here I am.

There are always going to be people who are going to be drawn to Get Rich Quick investing experiences. My guess is that Buy-and-Hold will always be with us. I accept that, just like I accept that lots of the humans (including this one!) eat too many darn cookies. That one doesn’t bother me.

What bothers me is the big distinction between how we handle Get Rich Quick thinking in the investing realm versus how we handle it in all the other realms. There are people in this world who will try to get my boys interested in taking drugs. But there are also people who do the opposite. My boys may end up taking drugs. I cannot control what happens. But I can point them to articles and stories and all sorts of things that make the case that taking drugs is a bad idea. I feel that I have a fighting chance re the drug-taking thing. They can hear both sides of the story and they can make their own decisions. It’s not a perfect situation but it is probably the best that we can do down here in the Valley of Tears.

It’s not like that in the investing realm. I posted honestly on safe withdrawal rates on the morning of May 13, 2002. Hundreds of friends of mine responded with great enthusiasm to the prospect of being able for the first time to learn the realities of how stock investing works according to the peer-reviewed research. I care about those people and I want to help them out. I want to present the anti-drug case to them. I want to show them how much better their lives can go if they resist the Get Rich Quick urge that we all possess. And they want to hear the message? Why should I not be permitted to make that case? Why should they not be permitted to hear it?

The answer is — money. There’s money to be made selling drugs and so the people who sell drugs would no doubt prefer to set up a system in which no one can ever make the anti-drug case. Fortunately, we do not live in such a world. People make the anti-drug case all the time. Those debating whether to take drugs or not get to hear both sides of the story before making their decision. It’s not that way in the investing realm. When Greaney put forward his first death threat, I went looking for sites where people discussed Shiller’s ideas on stock investing so that I could bring in some well-informed, friendly voices to our discussions. There are no such sites. The man has been awarded a Nobel prize because smart people recognize his great achievement. But Goons like you patrol the entire internet and make sure that no one anywhere feels safe telling people what the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research is teaching us.

I don’t buy it, Anonymous. This massive act of financial fraud is killing us. It’s probably more important that we get the non-Get-Rich-Quick word out re stock investing than it is that we get that word out re drug-taking. Even if there were no places on the internet that made the anti-drug case, is is probably only a limited portion of the population that would take drugs. People get caught up in other things as they age and leave their drug-taking days behind. It’s not like that in the investing realm. Every person who wants to retire someday has to invest in stocks. It is all but 100 percent mandatory. Deny people the ability to hear about research-based investing strategy and you are hurting 100 percent of the population. Even poor people who cannot afford to buy stocks are hurt when there is an economic depression because they lose their jobs and because depressions cause wars and wars kill rich people and poor people alike.

We have to find a way as a society to open up access to honest and accurate reports re how stock investing works according to the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. This is not just a good idea. It is a 100 percent required thing if we are to have any realistic hope of continuing to live in the way that we have always in the past lived in this country. We didn’t know how stock investing worked prior to 1981. So our ignorance was just one of those things. But we learned how stock investing works just in the nick of time. Just about every middle-class person invests in stocks today and these people cannot take the sorts of hits that are delivered to those who follow Buy-and-Hold “strategies.” We have to get the word out. Our economic system cannot survive if we do not. And, ultimately, our political system cannot survive if we do not. If we go into a Second Great Depression as a result of this massive act of financial fraud, there is a good chance that our political system will ultimately fall when millions of people who did all the right things according to the experts learn that they have lost most of their life savings because of a scam pushed relentlessly by our Wall Street Con Men friends and by our internet Goon friends.

If people want to follow Buy-and-Hold strategies, people can follow Buy-and-Hold strategies. If people want to promote Buy-and-Hold strategies, people can promote Buy-and-Hold strategies.n That’s all part of the wonderful game in these here United States of America. But no death threats. No demands for unjustified board bannings. No thousands of acts of defamation. No threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs. That stuff comes to a full and complete stop. But the close of business today. Farmer Hocus has spoken and so it shall be.

My wife is like everyone else. She would like our country to avoid going through a Second Great Depression. She obviously opposes the Goon behavior that for 15 years now has been threatening to bring one on. But she also possesses that natural human inclination to perceive the short term realities as more urgent than the long-term realities. She sees that others in the neighborhood can repair their porches when they fall into disrepair and she wants that for us. She wants to “buy things that I don’t care about,” in your words.

I care about fixing the porch. I want to pay for that. I have earned more than enough money to pay for that and I want to incur the expense today. But I am not willing to sell out my country to appease you Goons and thereby get my hands on the money today. The very fact that you have concluded that there is no way to defend the Buy-and-Hold strategy without engaging in criminal behavior tells me that this is an investing strategy that is not fit for humans. Someone has to lead the effort to open the entire internet to honest posting re the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. I wish that someone else had stepped up to do the job. I was elected. Given that reality, I intend to do the job to the best of my ability. I have never once for two seconds considered the possibility of selling my country to appease you Goons so that I can pay for those porch repairs today.

I’m not wired that way, Anonymous. Lots of people say they love their country. But you know what? You never really know how deep a love goes until it is tested. My love for my country has been tested. It remains strong. So we will see how things play out, you know? I am personally 100 percent certain that my country is going to come through for me and for all of us. But the proof is in the pudding. The pudding will be presented to us for our edification in the days following the next price crash. I wish you the best of luck with it. But that’s as far as it goes.

I hope that all that helps a small bit, dear Goon friend.

Rob

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

“Honest posting is code for people listening if they care to listen and electing not to listen if they do not care to listen while permitting all other community members to do the same.”

Everyone already believes that’s the current situation. That is, everyone except the tiny handful of people whose behavior is so atrocious that they need to be removed from the conversation. Nothing will change for those people until they realize that THEY are the problem.

And since you’ve said you will NEVER admit that you are the problem, nothing will ever change for you. So we’ve circled back to futility. You think my situation is futile? I can post wherever I want. I can go to the Bogleheads conference if I want. Not you. So you lash out in frustration, day after day, year after year, demanding that the world change to suit you. It ain’t gonna happen, son.

Now here’s where you say it will be interesting to see how it plays out.

You’re right, Anonymous. That’s exactly what I say here. No, I don’t think that I have presented any problem whatsoever. My contribution has been 100 percent positive. And it is has been a very, very, very BIG positive. I am humbled and honored to have been able to make that kind of contribution and it is certainly my intent to continue making it.

An easy way to see it is to look at the Ask Me Anything session that Wade Pfau did with the Financial Independence sub-reddit community recently. Wade said that the safe withdrawal rate is not always 4 percent. There is no way in God’s green earth that he would have gotten away with saying something like that before I came on the scene. I said something a lot more mild than that on the morning of May 13, 2002. All that I did then was to ask a question — I asked whether we should be taking valuations into consideration when calculating safe withdrawal rates. That was enough to cause Greaney and his Goons to threaten to come to my house with a baseball bat and to kill my wife and children as my punishment for my “crime.”

No one threatened Wade when he told the truth about safe withdrawal rates. That’s because things are changing for the better. Things are changing SLOWLY. But they are changing. And they are changing because people like me are becoming less and less willing all the time to tolerate the insane abusiveness of you Goons. Good for me! Good for all of us who stand up to you!

When I was at the Bogleheads Forum, they occasionally took polls of the community to see who the most popular posters were. John D. Craig and Microlepsis always scored near the top of those polls. Those guys made huge positive contributions. But they were attacked mercilessly by the sorts of “individuals” who have posted in “defense” of Mel Linduaer. And of course once Lindauer and his Goon pals got control of the community, those two great posters were banned for life. Surprise! Surprise!

I am going to bring them back. I am 100 percent sure that, when they are brought back, they will offer us all even more good stuff than they offered us in earlier days because they will feel free to say what they believe to an extent that they never felt to do so before. And I will encourage other top-notch posters who today are afraid to say what they believe to do so. That’s how you grow a board. Word will spread all over the internet and things will just get better and better and better and better for all of us. Even for you Goons, believe it or not!

Yes, we will see how it all plays out. I love my country and I have full confidence that my country will do the right thing for all of us in the end. I wish that it all happened like magic. I wish that it hadn’t taken 15 years already to get there. But the important thing is that we get there in the end. And I remain 100 percent confident that we will get there in the end. And that, when we look back, each and every one of us will say that it was worth the fight it took to get us there 500 times over.

Could I be wrong?

I could be wrong. It’s been known to happen.

That’s why I say that we will just have to wait and see.

You can indeed post wherever you want. But there’s a problem that you overlook when you say that. Because of your behavior, you cannot be challenged in your beliefs in the way that you need to be challenged in your beliefs to learn what you need to learn to become the most effective investor you can become. So you have hurt yourself as much as you have hurt millions of other middle-class investors.

I don’t play it that way. I want to be challenged and I want to challenge others. I want us all to learn all that we can possibly learn about this important subject matter at this exciting time to be learning about it. I will always wish you all good things because I think of you as a friend despite your goonishness. But one of the good things that I will always wish you is that you be surrounded by fellow community members who care enough about you to challenge you when they think that you have gotten onto a track that may hurt you in the end. That’s one of the things that I mean when I say that I wish you all good things.

I cannot play it any other way, Anonymous. I worked it hard when I was putting together my plan not to get any of the numbers wrong. If I knew that a friend of mine saw that I had gotten a number wrong and that he lacked the courage to tell me, I would have been pretty darn pissed about it. So I am not going to do that to any of my friends. When I saw that Greaney got an important number wrong, I told him. It took me three years to work up the courage, but I did eventually do it. That’s a true friend. No, I am not the problem. And it’s not a close call.

I wish you the best of luck in all your future life endeavors, okay? That much I can do. I have a funny feeling that you may be waiting a long time for this other thing you seem to be set on. But I do indeed wish you the best in all your future life endeavors. I do that with a full and an open heart, my long-time Goon friend. That far I can go and that far I am happy to go.

Rob

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

Rob, you seem utterly demoralized. That’s a shame. Despite your many horrendous faults, at least you always had enthusiasm. I guess even zealots get tired.

But before you turn the lights off here, I hope you will grace us with a sentimental reflection. No doubt with some big FUs at Greaney and his gang of goons.

I am certainly very demoralized re the 15-year cover-up, Anonymous. But I am also very, very, very, very excited about the 36 years of amazing peer-reviewed research and the hundreds of powerful insights into how stock investing works that can be discovered by following its many far-reaching implications. So it’s a mixed bag. The bad news here is bad indeed. But the good news here is 50 times more good than the bad news here is bad.

I certainly don’t approve of you Goons. But it is my strongly held view that you Goons are only a small part of the story. You couldn’t get away with what you get away with if the Get Rich Quick urge were not deeply implanted within all of us. The big story is how Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research findings point us all to the way in which we can overcome the Get Rich Quick urge that has been making stocks a high-risk investing class for many. many years. I am humbled and honored to be playing the role that I am playing to bring Shiller’s “revolutionary” (his words) findings to every investor on Planet Earth. I’m working on it! I’m working on it!

I am 100 percent confident that things will turn for the better, Anonymous. You are correct that I do not possess the same level of enthusiasm today that I possessed at earlier times. I AM a zealot of a sort. I believe strongly in the power of the peer-reviewed research to take us to exciting new places. So I very much want to take us the last mile that we need to travel to get over the Big Black Mountain that is causing so much human misery today.

I’d like to be able to flip a switch and get that enthusiasm back in 10 seconds. But it just doesn’t work that way. We are collectively working our way through a process and I need to stick to it as the process unfolds just like everybody else. I see better things down the road. But I certainly worry about what we are all going to need to travel through to get to the other side. There’s a dark patch up ahead, according to the research.

That’s my sincere take, in any event. I wish you Goons all the best despite our differences re how stock investing works.

Rob

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

My weakness is that I spent way to much time playing “poke-the-troll” with you. While I did not waste anywhere near the time you have wasted over the past couple decades, the minimal time I did spend was obviously a waste. Time for me to move on. My parting advice is for you to consider all the time you have wasted and the negative impact you have had on your family. Stop wasting you time and focus on be a provider versus a troll.

Okay, Anonymous.

I wish you all good things.

Rob

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

There are thousands of people on the various financial boards that are not buy and holders, yet they aren’t banned like you are. Why is that?

They self-censor themselves, Anonymous. They put forward posts indicating that they hold some doubts re Buy-and-Hold. Yes, I acknowledge that that is tolerated by the Buy-and-Holders. But they pull their punches. They don’t share with their fellow community members the full extent of their concerns re Buy-and-Hold. They walk on their tip-toes. They let things slide that they shouldn’t let slide. They keep it zipped re the most sensitive issues. They don’t argue their points as forcefully as they are capable of arguing them.

I don’t play that game. I post with FULL honesty. I believe that this stuff is too important for me to do otherwise. I play to win. I love my Buy-and-Hold friends. I show them respect and affection and gratitude for the many things I have learned from them. But I do not hesitate to go into intellectual battle with them when they say something that I think could be dangerous to my fellow community members in the event that the point were to remain unchallenged.

It is my job to argue my points as forcefully as I possibly can argue them. I certainly do not want my Buy-and-Hold friends to do anything less. They believe in Buy-and-Hold and so they have a responsibility to argue forcefully for it, just as I have a responsibility to argue for Valuation-Informed Indexing. There is not one case that I can recall where a Buy-and-Holder pulled his or her punches. The Buy-and-Holders fight (intellectually) all out all the time. They are right to do so. They need to do that for the boards to work.

But it is a very, very, very small number of the Valuation-Informed Indexers who do the same. I try hard to argue my points as forcefully as I see the Buy-and-Holders arguing theirs because I don’t think that the boards can achieve their purpose unless we ALL feel free to say exactly what we believe. I want to set an example for other Valuation-Informed Indexers. I want them to look at me and say “that fellow is saying what he truly believes, maybe I can get away with doing the same” and then follow suit. I want to make all the posters who believe that Buy-and-Hold is dangerous to feel as welcome in our board and blog communities as do the Buy-and-Holders.

The root problem is that 90 percent of the population believes in some form of Buy-and-Hold today while only 10 percent believes in some form of Valuation-Informed Indexing. Believing in Valuation-Informed Indexing at our boards and blogs is like being the first black or the first woman ever hired at a big corporation. You have this feeling that, if you make one mistake, you will be crushed for it. So you become highly reluctant to say anything even the tiniest bit controversial. You avoid not only actual mistakes but even statements that are 100 percent accurate but that will be perceived as mistakes by the 90 percent on the other side of the table.

Anyone who compares what I said on the morning of May 13, 2002, with what Wade Pfau said in his Ask Me Anything session on Reddit this week will gain a good sense of the nature and extent of the problem. I didn’t say that the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies were in error in my famous post. All that I did was ask a question. I asked “Should we be giving consideration to valuations when calculating the safe withdrawal rate?” That post was like a nuclear bomb. We are still feeling the reverberations from that one today. But Wade’s life was not threatened when he made a much stronger statement in his Reddit session. He said flatly that he does not believe that the safe withdrawal rate is always 4 percent. I implied that, Wade said it plainly. But my post generated 50 times more flak.

Why? Because no one had ever said such a thing before when I said it. It came as a shock when I said it 15 years ago. Enough people have said it by now that there were no expressions of shock when Wade said it. I am highly confident that there were lots of people listening in when Wade spoke who did not agree with what he said. But things have reached a point where saying something that was a complete and total heresy in 2002 has become sort of ho-hum today. So Wade “got away” with it.

I am happy that Wade got away with saying that the Buy-and-Hold studies are in error (that’s my word, not his, but that is what he is saying, he is saying that 4 percent is not always safe). But I want Wade and lots and lots of other people to feel free to give expression to lots and lots of other implications of the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. I want to see people saying things that have never been said before at every investing discussion board and blog on the internet on a daily basis. I want to see more and more and more and more of it.

If we all feel free to post honestly, there will be some things said that will ultimately be revealed to be wrong. You know what? That’s a good thing. We should all want false claims to be revealed to be false. By permitting honest posting, we will encourage the posting of both more true statements and more false statements. Both types help us all. The true statements teach us things we would never have learned had we not permitted the posting of those statements. And the false statements confirm our confidence in our current beliefs when they are exposed as false. It’s all good so long as posters from both “sides” follow the published rules of the various boards and blogs.

My post of May 13, 2002, asking whether we should be giving consideration to valuations when calculating the safe withdrawal rate should not have come as a shock to anyone. It came as a shock to lots of smart people because as a community we had fallen into the bad practice of thinking that we knew it all and had nothing new to learn about the subject of stock investing. My question was a good one and I did a good thing by posting it. Wade Pfau ,might well not be questioning the accuracy of the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies today had I not worked up the courage to advance that post. Wade learned much of what he knows about safe withdrawal rates from me and from the hundreds of other brave posters who informed me by posting honestly themselves in the years from May 2002 until the time when Wade saw the first post of mine that he saw at the Bogleheads Forum.

Those who believe that the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research in this field is legitimate research should not have to risk being made to run a gauntlet as punishment for the “crime” of posting their sincere views on stock investing. We should ENCOURAGE all posters to post honestly, both the Buy-and-Holders and the Valuation-Informed Indexers. I was banned because I was not willing to accept the second-class status to which you Goons (not all Buy-and-Holders, but a significant percentage of them, perhaps 10 percent and a highly influential 10 percent) would like to assign any community members who holds views not in accord with your own.

I offer no apologies for posting honestly, I am proud that I do so. I do not respond to acts of intimidation aimed at shutting me up. If anything, acts of intimidation make me more convinced that Buy-and-Hold needs to be effectively challenged at every board and blog on the internet. When we see death threats being posted by a small percentage of the Buy-and-Hold community and the much larger percentage of the Buy-and-Hold community keeping their mouths shut re the violation of U.S. law, we have a serious, serious, serious problem on our hands.

I call that sort of thing out every time I see it. So you Goons see me as a greater threat than any of the other community members who do not share your views on investing. I wear your hatred of me as a badge of honor. I am banned at every board and blog on the internet where a large number of Buy-and-Holders congregate because I won’t tolerate the b.s. of the lowest of the low among us. Good for me, you know?

I am your best friend. Anonymous. I hold you to minimal standards of human decency. Had all the others who disagree with you on investing held you to those same standards all along, you wouldn’t be today on a path that will land you in a prison cell in the days following the next crash. Those people let you down with their cowardice. I tried to lift you up. Your hate has been stronger than my love for 15 years running now. But I believe with my entire heart, mind and soul that my love (and the love of all the community members who adopted the rules that govern posting at all of our boards and blogs — and that’s all of us!) will triumph in the end. We will of course have to wait to see how things play out following the next crash to know for sure.

I wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person in any event, my long-time abusive, Buy-and-Hold-believing friend.

Rob

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

“If a site owner bans people from his site solely because those people have posted honestly on safe withdrawal rate, that is fraud. That gets you put into prison.”

A site owner can ban anyone, for any reason. Except for you, no one has ever suggested otherwise. You cannot link to a single example of anyone who was ever subjected to the slightest punishment (let alone prison) for banning someone. And yet for your scenario to make any sense, you have to make this wild leap from the zero punishment reality to a mass imprisonment fantasy.

Kind of a tough sell, isn’t it?

You cannot link to a single example of anyone who was ever subjected to the slightest punishment (let alone prison) for banning someone.

If you spend a few minutes searching on Google, you will find lots of cases in which someone was held liable for internet harassment. The law is not as developed in this area as it is in many other areas because the internet is a relatively new thing. But the caselaw relating to the internet is certainly in the process of being developed and generally not in a good way for you Goons.

this wild leap from the zero punishment reality to a mass imprisonment fantasy.

This is the BIGGEST case of internet harassment yet seen in history, that much is certainly so. This is the first case in which MILLIONS of lives were destroyed as a result of the harassment campaign. That’s all the more reason to be certain it is prosecuted, no? As a people we do not want to see millions of lives destroyed because some internet Goon is embarrassed for people to learn that he got an important number wrong in a retirement study posted to his web site.

If we want this internet thing to do some good in the world, we need to be sure to see cases like this prosecuted. That is how we change the world for the better. Or at least so it seems to Old Farmer Hocus. I would like to see some good come of this, Anonymous. Call me madcap. We have seen thousands of good people express a desire that we all be permitted to use the internet for the purposes for which it was created. Let’s do it, you know? We are not going to get there by worrying what you Goons might say about us if we post our sincere views. We are all going to have to work up a little backbone to get from the horrible place where we reside today to the wonderful place where deep in our hearts we all (including you Goons!) want to be tomorrow.

Everything good that ever happened in the world was achieved through the playing out of a process. THIS IS THE PROCESS. I wish it was a prettier picture, you know? It is what it is. This is the process that we are stuck with in this particular case. We can move forward and help millions learn what it takes to retire early or we can let the poison that you Goons have injected into the bloodstreams of our communities kill us all. I vote for moving forward. No apologies.

I don’t know about the mass imprisonment thing. My guess as to how this will go down is that there will be proposals for enactment of an amnesty following the next price crash. I don’t believe that everyone will be covered by the amnesty. But I believe that most of those who are at risk will be. That’s something that we will need to work out together as a community of people. I personally do not envision mass imprisonments. But I do expect to see imprisonment of the worst cases. We will have to wait to see how it all plays out to find out for sure.

My best wishes, Goon friend.

Rob

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

“Why do you get to dictate what people say about stock investing on the internet?”

The question is why do you think you should have this right? Why do you think you should be able to post what you want, where you want and when you want? Just as you decide what you will allow on your website, others have the same right to allow what they want. Every website owner controls their own content.

You are stating the general rule. But there are limits to the general rule. When you cross the line into committing financial fraud, you have gone too far.

Bernie Madoff went to prison because he created phony transaction statements that led the owners of shares in his fund to believing that the fund had purchased certain companies at certain prices and then sold those companies at better prices. Madoff could not say: “Oh, there’s no law against writing the names of companies and then dollar signs and numbers on pieces of paper and then mailing those pieces of paper to thousands of people.” No, there’s no law against doing that. But there is a law against financial fraud and Madoff’s clear purpose was to trick the owners of his fund into thinking that the transactions described on these pieces of paper had really taken place. Madoff is in prison today. Properly so.

So it is with John Greaney and with those who have posted in “defense” of him. Website owners control their own content. But to cover up an error that one has made in a retirement study is an act of financial fraud. If a site owner bans people from his site solely because those people have posted honestly on safe withdrawal rate, that is fraud. That gets you put into prison.

It is ultimately juries who have to decide which people who committed the crime in an objective sense go to prison and which do not. Wade Pfau presents a sympathetic case because he put his career on the line trying to get the authors of the Trinity study to correct their study. Wade ULTIMATELY committed financial fraud. But he obviously did so with his feet dragging. Wade obviously WANTED to do honest work. So, if I were sitting on his jury, I would let him off. I think that the men and women who are appointed to sit on his jury will also let him off. But I cannot decide the matter for them. The jury members get to make that decision. I trust our system to produce good results. So I just have to leave it to the jury to do good work.

Under no circumstances do I want to commit financial fraud myself. First of all, I do not want to leave it to a jury to decide whether I go to prison or not. I believe that a jury would be sympathetic to my case if I agreed to say that Greaney’s study contains a valuation adjustment. But why should I have my life riding on what a jury decides? It seems better to me for me just to not commit the crime in the first place. That’s why I told Wade that I thought that he was “insane” to flip to the Goon/Criminal side of this matter.

Second, I don’t want there to be more Wade Pfau’s in the future. Or more Mel Linduaer’s. Or more John Greaney’s. Or more Jack Bogle’s. I want us all to feel free to post honestly re these critically important matters at every discussion board and blog on the internet. Why even train people to become academic researchers in this field if we are not going to permit them to post honestly? We need the Wade Pfau’s of this world doing honest work. Every last one of us needs that. It’s a win/win/win/win/win.

If I commit financial fraud myself, I am making the situation worse rather than better. Each time another person with a desire to do honest work flips to the Goon side out of a fear of the intimidation tactics being used against them, it scares others who are on the edge and trying to work up the courage to post honestly. It takes us down, down, down. It’s because people were afraid to speak back to Bogle back in 1981 that Greaney ended up in the place where he is today. Greaney is a friend of mine. So I very much wish that someone had had the courage to stand up to Bogle back in 1981, So I sure don’t want to make the same mistake by failing to stand up to Greaney in 2017. Selling out my fellow community members would just create more Greaney’s down the line. I want there to be fewer prison sentences and shorter prison sentences, not more, longer prison sentences.

Does all of that not sound at least roughly right to your ears, Anonymous? Do you not think it is better to have shorter prison sentences and fewer of them? In my mind, this is not even a close call. In my mind, there should be no controversy over this one. I only wish that Bogle had come clean back in 1981, and that, if he failed to do so because he was suffering from cognitive dissonance (which is a real phenomenon), that his friends had all encouraged him to come at least partially clean by saying that there was at least a chance that he had made a mistake and that he thus encouraged everyone to post honestly re these matters.

Rob