Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
Maybe Max can be your next JWR.
I look forward to the day when we have thousands of John Walter Russell’s posting at hundreds of different web sites on a daily basis, Anonymous. Each time someone works up the courage to stand up to you Goons, it makes it easier for all the rest of us who are trying to work up the courage to do so. Each time someone folds in the face of your abusiveness, it causes the rest of us to lose courage ourselves.
What we do affects others. We enacted the laws against financial fraud because we understand on an intellectual level how financial fraud is a bad thing, how it hurts people. But it is one thing to enact laws and to express support for those laws and something very different to put one’s own life and reputation at stake depending on enforcement of those laws to provide protection from a gang of internet Goons.
The people of the United States will prevail in the end, Anonymous. I am 100 percent certain. I will do all that I can to see that that happens as soon as possible so that your prison sentence ends up being as short as it can end up given the things that have already gone down. But that’s really as far as I can take it by myself. We need lots of Maxes and John Walter Russells to stand up to take us from the dark place where we are today to the amazing place where deep in our hearts we all long to be tomorrow. It’s a process that needs to play out. And I am 100 percent sure that we will see the magic happen in the days following the next price crash, when we all pull together to see that the laws of our nation are enforced and the economic crisis brought on by the relentless promotion of Buy-and-Hold strategies is brought to a full and complete stop.
But I could be wrong, right? That’s the drama of the thing, no?
Take care, man.
Rob
Oh Rob. You are so wonderful. I am so glad you are here to save us all from doom. We should just name you the King and all will be right in the world.
How about you name the U.S. economic system King? And the U.S. political system? And the U.S. justice system? And the system established by the published rules of every discussion board and blog in the Retire Early and Investing communities? And the people who formed the committee that awarded Robert Shiller his Nobel prize?
All that I have done is to follow in the footsteps of all those Kings. I offer no apologies. I love my country.
I think we are going to realize as a people at the end of this saga that we should have followed the basic principles by which we have long organized our lives in this country, that it was a tragic mistake to make stock investing analysis the one area that is exempt from all the usual rules of human decency and human integrity, no matter how good it made us feel to believe for a time that our portfolios were worth two times what the last 37 years of peer-reviewed research shows us they are worth.
Time will tell the tale. But that is certainly what I believe.
And I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person.
King Rob