Cobb

But there is an attraction to living la vida rica. We'd all like to retire early and have mojitos brought to our cabana. We'd all like our investments to remain safe and lucrative, flash our cards and make jokes about how much everything costs and what's priceless. It ain't gonna happen. Don't forget the dark side. Layoffs are just the tip of the iceberg of financial disasters that await capitalists. Consumers and wage-earners have it cushy, relatively speaking. The grandmother who loses her pension has our sympathy. The businessman who loses his bond rating drinks alone. Playing rich may be attractive, but holding on to your money is no joke. There are only a few ways to lose fifty cents, there are a million ways to lose a million dollars. Just ask anyone what they'd do with a million dollars.

There is a fundamental capitalist slant in angling towards an ownership society. But how it actually would play out in terms of class is what I'd be more interested to know. Sure owners are going to be a lot more fussy over their money than those who have it taken care of. Sure things will be more efficient when more people maximize. When you're a wage-earner, you worry about whether you're going to get a 3% or a 5% raise. But you don't worry about whether the next paycheck is going to be there. What would it do to our society if we converted all of the union employees into independent contractors? It would be like that Lending Tree commercial where all the bankers fill up your living room - suddenly a lot of self-important people like middle managers would become commodified headhunters. Not only that we'd start dealing with business cycles and volatility that we don't have now because of the stability inherent in the premises of wages and salaries. The ravages of capitalism will destroy pikers trying to keep up, just like seconds on the house, 28% credit cards and internet stocks. Everybody can't do this, and the more who try, the more it sucks the profit away from those who can. That's what commodification does.

We can invent new classes of 'investors' and 'owners' from now until doomsday. And we will. But we're not going to transform a society of people who can barely manage a 1040 form into junior capitalists. The door should be open and remain open. Let's hear it for the woman who jumps ship mid-career and for the love of sewing opens her own dress shop. Keep those SBA loans coming. But let's not pretend that many more millions of Americans who want to play rich can manage their own investment portfolios out among the expert investor class. Who do you take us for Motley Fools?

When I used to watch Louis Rukeyeser every week and Squawk Box every morning I watched lifetime investors scratch their heads in wonder about which way certain stocks would go. I've day-traded, channeled, optioned and hedged. I've won and lost big time. Government securities (and Inktomi) saved my bacon. Like a lot of relatively new investors I thought I knew more than I knew. In the end I wound up losing because even though our broker was a personal friend, he didn't have time for us little people. When it comes to investment brokerage, if you're not humping 6 figures, you're insignificant. Even then, you're small fry. Try to get in the first class of any mutual fund - if they didn't call you, you're too late, and beware of the ones they do call you for. Now I exaggerate because I lost somewhere around six figures all told between 94 and 2000. I'm over it, but lucky to still be married (she's a long term investor).

If Social Security is destined to tank, the best thing to do is stop new investment now. We cannot let it fail just like any other security. This ownership society rhetoric hides the fact that capitalists lose huge amounts of money, but depend on the government bedrock as a hedge. If that government hedge of Social Security fails, it will be no comfort to those sorry investors that they are now part of an 'ownership society'. They are consumers and wage-earners and cannot be instantly converted into capitalists.

Somewhere, somehow the full faith and credit of the United States, the most powerful nation on the planet, needs to mean something real to American consumers and wage-earners. We don't owe anyone any right to retire with ease. Investment is a tricky business. But we do need to convert those pensions into as safe an investment as possible as was promised in the prospectus. And if we must, we can say that's just not available any longer and new kids have to swim with the sharks. But let's not think that the virtues of capitalism are going to accrue to Joe Average when it comes to some arbitrary privatization of Social Security.

I have a tough time believing that the heavy hitters of the investment class will be denied the hedge of government backed securities. In fact, I believe they have first shot and that the pool is too small for them and Social Security. Somebody needs to tell Social Security pensioners just what class they belong to.