At some level each and every individual choice gets subsumed into a dynamic relation to other choices such that "the market" comes to exist with a life of its own. Every investor wants to know, what will the market do today? So there is something that troubles me about investor perspectives that seem to take for granted that "the market" is the only motive force worth respecting, as if the social reality of our lives could be so one-dimensional.
The investment-class perspective shows through when Cramer discourages higher wages at Wal-Mart. This is a perspective that overvalues existing savings to the detriment of new savings that could be made possible if "the market" were enabling more opportunity for all. If existing savings accounts were willing to take a little less return, perhaps new savings accounts could be more easily started downstream.
In the case of my old neighbor Paul, why shouldn't a worker expect a social order in which every productive life is rewarded with decent wages, benefits, and pensions? But Frederick Douglass long ago advised Americans not to gnash our teeth at spectacles of unfairness. Struggle is the Real Cure.
As corporate capital rebuilds its structure from the current bust to the next boom, why shouldn't some higher expectations of performance be costed in right now? I think I understand how these labor costs will make additional demands upon the structure of recovery, but if decent health benefits and pensions are made a universal condition of corporate earnings perhaps the regeneration of corporate health this time will help to raise up a new generation of investors who understand that money not budgeted toward labor's livelihood is at risk of being gambled away.
Finally, I have an intuition that the bias of the investor class leads to a skewed desire for a gold standard, but I'm not altogether sure about this. It may be that my impression is colored by a context in which most of the talk about gold is by people who are thinking chiefly of wealth in individual terms. In five months of investing I too have gone from "gold, what's it good for" to "give me thirty shares of silver trust please." I'm up eleven dollars thanks to that call on SLV.
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