Suffer the Fools

Via InstaPundit, Jaceonline rips the Motley Fool for making a foray into politics from their traditional world of personal finance. The Fool apparently had a story on the changes coming down the line from the California Air Resources Board and about how everyone should naturally support their reccomendations and that anyone who doesn't is a big, dumb, irresponsible corporate jerk. Jaceonline takes 'em apart and hammers their use of statistics. Well done.

There seems to me to be a lot going on in the news recently that suggests that politics and politicians do not mix well with finance and financiers and vice versa. Steel tariffs may (or may not) make good political sense, but financially, they are a bad idea. The privatization of Social Security may be dangerous politically, but financially it is a sound move. Sleight-of-hand accounting practices are bad financially, but legislating thousands of pages of new laws, regulations, and guides and introducing new rules of oversight and accountability may also be bad financially.

I am not sure that the vast majority of our law school educated politicians have a very good overall handle on things financial. At the same time, I am not sure that all of the financiers have been willing to play by the rules legislated by the politicians. Stuck in the middle are a bunch of regular Joes and Janes who in general know less about the finance side of things and care less about the political side of things. How do we stop the folks in the middle from being screwed from both sides? Well, one good suggestion was electing a President with an MBA. So far, though, his emphasis has been all politics.

But I am getting a bit out of my own range here. My skills in the realm of corporate finance and macro-economics are lacking compared to some others in the blogosphere, and certainly my disinterest in politics makes it almost odd that I should even have a web log. Go read Megan McArdle and More than Zero Sum for better political/financial commentary. But go check out the Jaceonline article first; he did a fine job.

Jonathan 7/24/2002 08:07:00 AM