The stock market is open to everyone to invest in, and both its benefits and risks are presumably well known to everyone. But today, many people pool their resources together and invest through big funds run by professionals. There are advantages and convenience, but risks and benefits still remain, and you lose control. In an economic climate like this, you can get hurt, but that is the nature of investment. Growth with no risk just doesn't happen. All we can do is institute regulations to punish fraud, force full disclosure, and to operate in an industry-recognized and accepted manner, and much of that is a judgement call. But we cannot guarantee against risk.

It can be argued that long term investment, in spite of its ups and downs, will generally trend upward. If you've been investing for a very long time, most of your current losses are probably paper losses, you still have more in than you put in. A similar situation exists with my house, which has lost half its market value over the last 6 months or so, but is still worth more than I promised to pay for it when I bought it. If I sell it, I get my money back and then some, but I will not recover the interest, taxes, maintenance and insurance money that are part of the costs of ownership. Still, I have to live somewhere, so owning is cheaper than renting.

I got out of stocks because I felt that the whole premise of eternal economic growth was simply unsustainable. And I knew that those who thought otherwise were either fools or villains. Or both. Not only would our depletion of natural resources and population growth eventually put an end to it, but our business practices themselves were not good business in the long run. We encouraged wasteful consumption, excessive consumer credit, deficit spending, ballooning balances of payments, services over industry, foreign products and labor over our own domestic strengths, simply because it was more profitable. In short, we were running the country like we were planning to emigrate in the near future. This was tripartisan, the public loved the affluence, the Dems were too cowardly to lose votes by insisting on their own policies, and the Reps insisted there was no problem. The future would take care of itself, it always had. I'm glad I got out, although I wish I had waited 20 years before I did, I'd be a rich man now! And as I mentioned, I'm still vulnerable to an FDIC failure, Weimar-style inflation, Social Security and Pension plan collapse, or even the most routine medical emergency.

This is all part of the free enterprise system. Taking the hits is part of the price we pay for a machine that runs smoothly and fairly most of the time. But I do believe we have a right to intervene against individuals who either know the system well enough that they can unfairly or illegally manipulate it, or short-circuit the checks and balances by the sheer economic power they can command, who bribe the government to provide them with a regulatory environment that favors them at the expense of their customers, stockholders, or competitors,or who just flat out lie and break the law.

I agree that regulation is often inadequate, or ill-considered, or influenced by the regulated,
and that even the best regulation will eventually be evaded by clever operators. But what alternative do we have? The far right tells us "the free market will take care of everything, just leave us alone, we know what we're doing." I don't believe a word of it. What else would you expect them to say? Either they are people who know the game and know they can win if left to operate unsupervised, or they are wannabees who fancy themselves this kind of people and need to blame their own failure in business on the evil socialists out to plunder their goods.