Life's Crooked Casino

Today, the Nashville media announced that median home values had fallen $15,000 on an annualized basis here. Our 401Ks seem to be melting away with every statement. Government securities may provide safety but yield virtually nothing. So what is the prudent investor to do? I asked a wise man, Illuminate Sr., who supported his family doing backbreaking labor as a child of the Great Depression, who began working eighty years ago, and who has owned and operated a variety of businesses and invested consistently mostly buy and hold throughout his life, what should be done now? He replied with the story of his friend Gordon who was an inveterate small town gambler. Gordon would lose the bread and milk money of his young wife and growing family almost nightly. Well, Sr. asked him if he knew the tables were rigged? "Why yes", Gordon replied, "of course I know the game is fixed but it is the only game in town. " We have all staked our futures on sticky-handed croupiers. The winning hand may be held by a derivative player in an alternate universe. The safe bet is there are no more safe bets.

Calling All Consultants

This column is engendered by some local Nashville news. A consultant retained by the Metro Fair Board spoke for forty-five(45) minutes about the need to modernize our fair, perhaps relocate it, and the viability or rather lack there of, of the motor speedway that is located within the fair complex. All this is way inside baseball with no national implications except that the consultant said whatever course Metro takes, it will be expensive. And there is the rub. Anytime a public entity wants something that will cost the taxpayers dearly, they cherry pick a consultant, who does not come cheap, to justify another exorbitant expenditure of the peoples' hard earned but all too easily taken by government money. The same ploy was used with consultants being retained to give cover to a raise in executive compensation at our electric company-a public utility. Have you ever heard of a consultant giving thumbs down on any project? I haven't; that must be as rare as a June bug on the North Pole. Why do government professionals need consultants in the first place? If their purview is not within their field of expertise, why are they there in the first place? We can save a ton of money by firing the bureaucrats and letting the consultants make all the decisions. That way we cut out the middle man.