jenk

Chet Currier has a cool article on how bureaucracy screws up investment choices. Example?

The similarities, or differences, between two contrivances like 401(k)s and 529s have nothing whatever to do with the natural business of saving for retirement, college or any other purpose.

Both are artificial mechanisms, built out of legal rules and tax technicalities. Every element of them balances or counteracts some other proviso in the system of red tape. Otherwise there would be no reason for their existence.

Do free, informed people such as live in our society really need some ersatz "incentive" to save for their children's schooling or their own old age? [...] When bureaucracy sets out to help natural impulses along, it often has the perverse effect of dulling them by swathing them in a tangle of procedures.... Whether the intentions are good or not is beside the point.

The point of investing is to make money for yourself, not save on taxes or please the government.

Sigh.

I may have been hanging out with