03/25/10 Paris, France – Dear readers get a break today.
We’re on our way back to the USA. No time to check the markets…
Here’s something for the “miscellaneous” file, something we found in the paper this morning:
A team of Canadian researchers wanted to know if people who bought “green” products were nicer than other people. They did a study of it and came to the conclusion, as reported in The Financial Times, that “those who bought supposedly ethical products were more likely to lie, cheat and steal and less likely to take the chance to be kind.”
Hmmm…
From this, they drew the wrong conclusions. They came to believe that there was a finite amount of niceness in the world and that those who take the trouble to buy ethical products use up much of their allotted stock.
Of course, even horrible people can be nice. And nice people can be horrible. After all, Hitler was nice to his secretaries and his dogs. But that doesn’t mean that those who are nice to their secretaries and their dogs have to incinerate Jews and gypsies. Or even yell at waiters.
Where the researchers and commentators go wrong is in the beginning. They think that buying an ‘ethical’ mutual fund…or a ‘green’ car…is a form of being nice. It is nothing of the sort. It is a substitute for being nice. Being nice is not always easy. Many people have a hard time with it. Others judge it not worth the effort…or even counterproductive. Niceness was probably as useless to Attila the Hun as virtue is to a prostitute or integrity is to a politician.
Still, most people manage to be nice most of the time…and a few – including our own mother – manage to do it practically all the time. We have never heard our mother say a word that wasn’t nice. She has never had an unkind thought, as near as we can tell.
Nice people don’t have to pretend to be nice by buying supposedly ethical products. They are nice; that’s what counts to them. The person who buys ethical products, on the other hand, is a scalawag and a hypocrite. He is not really nice at all, which is what the researchers really discovered.
“Love afar is spite at home,” wrote Emerson. He was talking about people who are nice to mother earth…but nasty to their own mothers. Or people who are nice to ‘humanity’…but mean to their next-door neighbor. Or people who whine about starving children they have never seen and ‘underprivileged’ people they hope they’d never have to meet. He was talking about people who buy a cup of “fair trade” coffee and don’t leave a tip…
Emerson knew there was no limit on niceness. He was talking about dreadful people who weren’t nice. The do-gooders. The meddlers. The improvers. The health care Democrats. And the “no child left behind’ Republicans. He was talking about all the bleeding hearts whose own hearts are as black and hard as a lump of coal.
Regards,
Bill Bonner
for The Daily Reckoning
Bill Bonner
Since founding Agora Inc. in 1979, Bill Bonner has found success and garnered camaraderie in numerous communities and industries. A man of many talents, his entrepreneurial savvy, unique writings, philanthropic undertakings, and preservationist activities have all been recognized and awarded by some of America's most respected authorities. Along with Addison Wiggin, his friend and colleague, Bill has written two New York Times best-selling books, Financial Reckoning Day and Empire of Debt. Both works have been critically acclaimed internationally. With political journalist Lila Rajiva, he wrote his third New York Times best-selling book, Mobs, Messiahs and Markets, which offers concrete advice on how to avoid the public spectacle of modern finance. Since 1999, Bill has been a daily contributor and the driving force behind The Daily Reckoning. Dice Have No Memory: Big Bets & Bad Economics from Paris to the Pampas, the newest book from Bill Bonner, is the definitive compendium of Bill’s daily reckonings from more than a decade: 1999-2010.
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Amen to this. There’s a similar story over at Lew Rockwell’s site today, and I hope to see more such stories in the future. I think people are beginning to realize that socialism and the strange brood of ideologies spawned by it are not ethical systems at all, but the raw machinery of usurpation and control.
Lest you should feel a twinge of guilt when some leftist accuses you of being uncaring and uncharitable, just remind that leftist that charity is the theological virtue by which we love God above all things for his own sake, and our neighbors as ourselves for the love of God. It has nothing to do with socialism, with universal health care, with equality, or with any other such nonsense. It has to do with willing the best for our fellow man, which is eternal union with the Father.
Shut up a lefty by asking if Obamacare will cover Pakistanis killed/maimed by Obama’s CIA drones or night-raids.
Maybe I don’t feed the hungry or heal the sick, but at least I don’t leave them fighting over body parts of their blown-up children (that really happened after one of O-bomb-a’s rockets killed children in POCK-EE-STON).
Suck on this Harry:
As painful as it is for the bulls to see, the equity market is still down 23.5 % from those March 2000 highs, not to mention still in the red by 25.4% from the record high posted in October 2007. The Nasdaq is still a Japanese-like 53% shy of its 2000 all-time high.
“…most people manage to be nice most of the time…and a few – including our own mother – manage to do it practically all the time.”
__________________________________
so did mine, bless her heart
What nonsense.
You are not on the way to anywhere. You are sitting in your crappy Baltimore apartment, in your underwear, spewing this “paper money bad, gold good” crappola to gloom and doomers.
Oh well, you need to earn a living just like the rest of us. Good luck to you.
“Paper money bad, gold good” is an accurate summation of the last decade.
Looks like bozo buys earth-friendly toilet paper.
Let’s see:
oz. gold 1980 850
DJI 1980 891
oz gold 2010 1100
DJI 2010 10841 (today)
Tell me again how that gold trade has worked out for you…?!?!?
Losers………
…here in canada we notice all the messages on american office notice boards concerning “found” money in the womens’ washrooms…funny though, american men never seem to lose theirs’…
Ha! Pure genius, today’s piece. I am here in Venice Beach, surrounded by super-liberal commie neighbors who call the police any time a homeless person comes around begging in our neighborhood, or tries to actually sleep overnight here in a car or RV!
And my kids go to school in the Palisades, there are Obama bumper stickers everywhere, but not a single black or Mexican for miles around…These are the people who vote for tax increases yet obtain their income from nontaxable income producing bonds…
Yes, no one is as hypocritical and evil as a do-gooders.
“We have never heard our mother say a word that wasn’t nice. She has never had an unkind thought, as near as we can tell.”
With mine it is just the opposite way. But then, she is quite smart nontheless.
LAgirl: First comment from you worth reading. Thanks.
bozo, your name is fitting. I could care less that you picked an outside event in the gold market to make your point. Or that you failed to notice that the DJI has failed to gain ground in 10 years.
What you are missing is that the DJI is not money. And, gold is. bozo, meet the forest…. try to avoid staring at the trees too long.