Shepherd.com is a brand-new website where authors recommend the five best books on a topic of their choosing. The topic of my choosing was The Biggest Questions, and while I doubt very much that I picked the five best books ever written in this category (by any standard you care to name), I am at least confident that I picked five well worth your attention.
Feel free to do any or all of the following:
- Tell me (and of course our readers) what you think are the most glaring omissions from my list.
- Tell us which other lists on that site are most worth checking out.
- Tell us what topic, and what five books, you’ll be choosing if you ever get the call for a contribution from Shepherd.
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The death of Bernie Madoff reminds me that I never understood why he was so vilified. He ran a Ponzi scheme. All of his investors knew it was a Ponzi scheme. They chose to get in, and gambled that they could time their exits just right. Some succeeded, some failed. So Madoff was the moral equivalent of a bookmaker (and not the kind of bookmaker who employs violence to enforce collections). He catered to a preference that some might call a vice. Where’s the problem?
There would be a problem if anybody had believed Madoff’s claim that he could earn a consistent 10% in any kind of market conditions, but it’s hard for me to imagine who that “anybody” might be — and if he or she does exist, then I don’t think it’s incumbent on the rest of us to protect an investor who is so willfully naive. The fact that he not only claimed to return 10% in every kind of market condition but actually did so constituted something like proof postive that he was running a Ponzi scheme, for anyone who cared to take notice.
So I think Madoff’s “lies” go into the same category as the alleged “lies” of Barack Obama when he said that under Obamacare, anybody who liked his/her old health insurance policy would be able to keep it. Nobody capable of arithmetic could have believed such an outlandish statement — unless they gave it no thought whatsoever, in which case even if they were fooled, they were fooled about something they apparently didn’t care about.
In other words: It’s not a lie if nobody believes it.
The scandal, I think, is that public resources were used to recover the losses of those who took the Madoff gamble and lost.
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It’s always a pleasure to do a Podcast with a host who is thoughtful, understands the issues, and engages in meaningful dialogue instead of just mindlessly plowing through a list of prepared questions. Remarkably many fail to clear that bar. Alex Epstein clears it easily. My interview with him is here.
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