A School of Bold Entrepreneurs

If you ever want to get a sense of what sheep people are, just pay attention to the stock market. Watching the mass reactions of these dolts who are regularly passed off as bold entrepreneurs and risk-takers would actually be quite laughable if it weren't for the fact that their collective zigs and zags--behaviors normally associated with minnows--caused tremendous harm to the normal population.

My point here is not to lobby for the closing of such markets or for more or even less regulation. What I'm hoping to encourage is laughter. Laughter at the idiots who work in and support this market. I hope, in however picayune a way, to encourage disparagement of these mice and to take the first chisel to the monument of worship that currently surrounds them.

There is nothing bold or brave or noble in the naked pursuit of money. As Mr. Bernstein says in Citizen Kane, "It's no trick to make a lot of money, if all you want is to make a lot of money." And yet, we live in an age (and perhaps all ages were like this) in which wealth is equated with wisdom and fitness is equated with saintliness. However, neither equation really stands, and there is nothing particularly virtuous about either.

To find wisdom, one must track down numerous sources. No one person or thing or institution (and I'd trust the person or the thing well before the institution) has the market for wisdom cornered. No one could. It is too vast and elusive to be penned up. It is found through suffering and illumination, not from living in a large, gauche McMansion, and its guardians tend to be individuals and not groups of people whose actions are nearly indistinguishable from the weavings and swoopings of a flock of starlings.