Sometimes, I wonder why.  It happened in big time in 1987, and again in the dot com crash.  It’s happening again now.  Some people try to live their lives in a way that suits their bourgeois sensibilities.  I am one such person.  I save my earnings, invest, avoid debt and do not buy things that I can’t afford. 

I was careful to get a fixed mortgage, so when the subprime crisis hit, it didn’t affect me.  Now it seems that people who took 110% mortgages with teaser rates are going to be bailed out by the government, as are the investors who purchased the mortgages from companies that took in bad loans.  

When the dot com market imploded, many of my funds, heavily invested in these stocks, lost a substantial amount of their value, some up to 70%.  That represented years of my work, countless legal fees, cases, defendants, trials. Poof. 

It’s happened again.  Not as badly (yet), but still I watched as my past year’s worth of work disappeared.  The talking heads on TV told me not to panic.  I never panic.  Maybe I should?  It wasn’t easy for many of my clients to pay my fees.  It wasn’t easy for me to earn them.  Now, it’s as if it never happened.

Yes, I fully realize that these are paper losses, not real losses, until the stocks are sold.  But anybody watch the old AOL, now Time-Warner (TWX) over the past 6 years?  Or, that one-time star, CMGI?  Even Disney, compared to where it was before the crash.  The market has never really recovered, and now we’re back in the dumps. 

Congress and the President have passed a package to juice up the economy.  We’ll get a check for a couple thousand in May or June.  Woo hoo.  That will change everything.

The libertarians speak to disincentives to conduct oneself appropriately.  With my daughter running off to college next year, I am busily filling out forms.  Financial aid should prove interesting.  If I had spent everything I made, I would be in a great position to have her attend college for free.  But being the good, responsible citizen, I saved enough to pay for college for my daughter.  I will pay for it.  Spend and enjoy.  Save and suffer.  It’s an interesting concept.

There are people who need and deserve our help.  There are people who make foolish, easy, selfish choices, but bear few consequences of their choices.  People like me pay for them instead.  We tell them, make the hard choice; Don’t go for immediate gratification, showing off, living like you’re the king when you can’t afford it.  They don’t listen.  But when things get tough, they are covered.  I’m left holding the bag.

They have sad stories.  Not the legitimate stories of illness, but the ones where they complain of how they are going to lose their homes because they can’t pay the mortgage, then drive off in their leased Mercedes Benz.  They are the ones with every gizmo every invented but without a dollar to buy a cup of coffee in the morning.  I feel like a Puritan next to them.  I could be as flashy as them, but I chose not to be.  Will there be pie in the sky when I die?

Not to complain, as I live a wonderful life notwithstanding all this, but I get tired of watching my investments dwindle because of some fellow I didn’t vote for paying for a war I don’t want using up my taxes like water.  I have those investments because I made certain choices in my life.  Other people made different choices, ones which I could have made but decided against.  I don’t feel responsible for those people.  Don’t make me pay for them. 

My good life isn’t a product of mere kismet, but choices.  No matter how much you earn, you can still screw it all up with stupidity.  We have an infinite capacity for doing stupid things, and it takes effort and sacrifice to make the decision not to be foolish.

Yet when I look at my portfolio and see the number so much lower than it was the day, week, month before, I wonder why I made the choices I did.  I could live like a king too, if I made different choices.  But I could never have lived with myself. 

I’m a lawyer.  I work for a living.  I pay my bills.  I get no million dollar year end bonuses. I get no pension.  But I’m getting awfully tired of watching my years of work disappear because of other people’s choices.  I am so bourgois.