<Sure everything's peachy from the WSJ's perspective. Its readers are the long-term players, the people who started the bubble, and, being at the apex of the pyramid, made out like bandits by screwing everybody else. I'm sure they're quite pleased with the profitable havoc they've wreaked.

Anyone who owned stocks lost something in the past couple of years. And yes, people who had been in stocks for years still came out ahead of the game. And yes, people who were playing the market stupidly lost a lot. Heck, I had a lot more in tech stocks than I should have, but at least it was in mutual funds, and I spread things out enough so that it wasn't everything. What no one likes to admit is that the ones who really took a bath were the ones trying to make the quick bucks, or the ones who didn't know what they were doing and shouldn't have been "playing" the market in the first place. Or both.

Yeah, I'm sure nobody but crooks read the Wall Street Journal.

It must be of immense comfort to life's losers to convince themselves that life's winners must have accomplished it by some kind of rotten trick. I dare say that much of the "evil rich" mantra stems from this motivation.

Oh, present company excepted, of course.