Come on, people now
Smile on your brother
Everybody get together
Try and love one another right now
- The Youngbloods
There is a sense in this country that we have never been more divided and that may be true, but clearly division is not a new thing. Not in America.
And that last point is extremely important. This is a nation founded as a protest. We view protesting as one of our basic rights and founding principles. Not all countries have that. A Chinese man once told me that in the privacy of his own home he can criticize the government, but if he went out on the street and shouted that the Chinese communist party is no good, he would disappear and never be heard of again. In countries like that, conformity is everything. But in America, we hold dear our right to speak out our opinions, no matter if they are viewed as crazy or irreverent or unpatriotic by others.
Recently I saw a short video in which Neil deGrasse Tyson observed that something has changed about that. When he was younger, if you had an opinion that differed from someone else, you could discuss it over a beer and, at worst, agree to disagree. But now, especially on social media, people with different opinions get attacked. Thankfully, these attacks are almost always verbal, but they are attacks.
It makes me wonder if we really want to live in a country in which we all think the same, whether we want to or not. I hope we don’t.
But let’s talk some more about why we seem to be at each other’s throats. First, we always have been. By we, I mean Americans. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were always at each other. And that’s just at the dawn of the United States. Division started long before that. We have always cherished our right to protest, to be angry, to have an opinion. As Americans, unlike the Chinese man above, we have every right to go out on the street and shout to anyone that will listen that our government stinks.
Late night talk show host, Craig Ferguson, was born in Scotland, moved to the United States and on becoming a US citizen declared that, “America is the greatest country that anyone ever invented. You take all kinds of people and throw them together and let them duke it out.”
But while you cherish this, remember that the idiot who doesn’t agree with you (his idiocy entirely being because he doesn’t agree with you!) is your fellow American. His right to be an idiot is the same as your right to think he’s an idiot.
We need to not only embrace our own right to speak our mind, but the rights of those who don’t agree with us, and further, we need to embrace them as our fellow Americans.
Now all this is interesting but what does it have to do with investments? Since the beginning of this nation and its stock market, our nation has been in non-stop conflict. Either we have been in conflict with other nations or with ourselves. To this day the bloodiest war in American history is our own Civil War. Change and conflict have been constant throughout our history and growth is very close behind. While not constant, growth has occurred much more often than contraction and this has been especially true in the last 80 years since the end of WWII.
Trying to get out of the way of trouble has usually been a fool’s errand because over the last 80 years, trouble has been much shorter-lived than growth.
If I told you that I had a coin that was weighted so that it would come up heads 75% of the time that you toss it, and I proved it to you by tossing it repeatedly so that you could see that it would come up heads much more often than tails, would you bet on tails coming up or heads?
Of course you should bet on heads. No one can guarantee anything about the future but for over 200 years it’s been a mistake to bet against the American economy.
No matter your opinion of the government, our elected officials, our vast amount of problems, etc, history says that your best course is to assume that the US economy will continue to grow as it has in the past and that the stock market will follow it, nervously and with drama, but generally in the same direction.
I close with this optimistic thought about our conflicts, worries and problems. From Sir Winston Churchill, “Americans will always do the right thing, after they have exhausted all other possibilities.”
Hal Masover is a Chartered Retirement Planning Counselor and a registered representative. His firm, Investment Insights, LLC is located at 508 N 2nd Street, Suite 203, Fairfield, IA 52556. Securities offered through, Cambridge Investment Research, Inc, a Broker/Dealer, Member FINRA/SIPC. Investment Advisor Representative, Cambridge Investment Research Advisors, Inc., a Registered Investment Advisor. Investment Insights, Inc & Cambridge are not affiliated. Comments and questions can be sent to hal@getyourinsight.com
These are the opinions of Hal Masover and not necessarily those of Cambridge, are for informational purposes only, and should not be construed or acted upon as individualized investment advice. Investing involves risk. Depending on the types of investments, there may be varying degrees of risk. Investors should be prepared to bear loss, including total loss of principal. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.