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Thursday, January 08, 2009

Help!  I’ve Been Raped!

The analogy works.  She is me.  She wears make up and goes on dates because she would like to find a good man.  I invest in ways that predict the future because I want to make money.  We have been raped.  In her case, it started as a date, and she saw the signs but the man she was with was someone her friend knew, an old college friend, so she could not believe he would force himself on her.  In my case, it started as an investment that would pay off as the financial crisis unfolds.  We investors who can tell that things are that bad provide signals that they are bad by putting out money where our mouths are.  This is called shorting, and in my case, I did it through an investment known as SKF.  In her case, she signals to men that they are worthy of her attention, and that she is interested in going further by flirting with them.

And our signal was put to good use.  She got a date.  My investment in SKF was going up, and banks were beginning to fail, as I and so many others predicted, not only with our words, but with our money.

In her case, he decided to reverse her interest in him by taking what he wanted without respect for her person, the essence of healthy sexual relationships.  In my case, the government decided to reverse my fortunes and those of everyone who had so WISELY predicted the failures by taking what it wanted directly from the taxpayers without respect for their freedon of choice, the essence of a healthy country.

So what do we do now, she and I?  The most empowering thing for a rape victim to do is help identify the rapist.  This works because society views rape in a negative light.  This is one place where the analogy breaks down because society views government intervention as a good thing. Perhaps there are those like Galt, Danneskjold, and d’Anconia who would recognize the violation, but we are few and far between.

Some suggest that I stop investing since this kind of thing can happen.  This is like telling the rape victim that she should stop wearing make-up and dating.  It is the right and proper function of intelligent people to invest in ways that predict the future, just as it is right and proper for hotties to get dates with men in order to find and reward the good ones.

Society suggests that her best course outside of finding the rapist is to take martial arts classes and get involved in other programs that help prevent rapists from being successful.  The martial arts, I have been taking since I was young (learning how to invest, and how to tell when things are going badly or well).  Are there programs out there that help prevent the government from being successful at using taxpayer money to cloud and reverse the predictions of those who understand what is happening in the economy?  There is one that I know of.  It is the Austrian School of Economics and it can be explored at http://www.mises.org.