The older I get, the more I realize how much that investing maxims about thinking for oneself and not following the crowd apply so well to life in general.
Not being caught up in crowd wisdom is a long-term winner. But the art of contrarian thinking is knowing when to be in the minority.
An example from our current investment situation: The stock markets are dramatically overvalued by all traditional measures, and the government is undermining investments for the long term by artificially restraining interest rates while at the same time exploding the money supply, much of which is flowing into stocks and aiding the unsustainable price ascent.
This sort of thing always has ended badly in the past, examples being the Mississippi Bubble, the South Sea Bubble, the Dutch Tulip Bulb Mania, The Roaring Twenties in the U.S., and more recently, the collapse of the Japanese Stock Market Bubble, and the U.S. Dot.com bust.
But betting against any of those runaway trends too early was the recipe for a trip to the poorhouse. Yes, I know poorhouse is an anachronistic term for what once happened to the penniless. Now they live in Section 8 housing across the street, eat 2 or 3 meals a day delivered by one of those ubiquitous online services, and generally live a middle class lifestyle complete with family and dog.
So, if you are comfortable with life on the dole, feel free to bet it all on Bitcoin and go Section 8 if it ends badly.
For the rest of us, the ability to provide for the wants and needs of ourselves and our families engenders a certain sense of pride.
If you fall into that latter group, the responsible ones, it is time to contemplate how much longer you will accept the tyranny of the minorities.
An example is how we are being bombarded by race and sexual orientation messages nightly via television advertising.
Our flaky president – Biden, not Harris – has cited such multi-racial or gay families in advertising as evidence of great progress in society. Many dismissed this as just another Biden verbal headscratcher. But sometimes the flighty Joe speaks the inner truth of his party.
Just as surely as students are indoctrinated with anti-American teachings in our public schools, television is being used to create a false impression of this country. And it is working.
Judging by representations of race in television commercials, you’d think blacks make up about 50 percent of the country’s population. Not according to the U.S. Census Bureau, which puts that number at 13.4 percent give or take. That’s about 1 out of every 7.5 people.
That’s not the commercial breakdown, or even the cast breakdown in television shows, especially if we include in our calculus cable outlets with black in their title, such as black entertainment or black news networks.
But it’s even worse regarding same-sex couples. A recent Gallup poll indicated the average adult believes gays make up about 24 percent of the U.S. Population. Meanwhile, a 2017 Gallup study that relied on respondents self-identifying, put the actual gay population number at 4.5 percent.
Why are so many people so high in their estimates of gays?
Consider a Credit Karma commercial you likely have seen. The car alarm continually goes off at random, but due to poor credit scores, the couple can’t afford a new vehicle. That couple is two guys, one white and one black. And just to make sure you got it, the commercial ends with them in the same bed for the night.
They have kids, of course, a black boy and what seems to be a white girl.
Just to pile on, the black man is the smart one, telling the dumb white guy how Credit Karma can help fix that credit rating problem. It all ends with the lights being turned off and one man telling the other that he loves him.
This commercial gets a lot of play, as do others like it.
The sheeple among the population – and they are many having been spawned as the desired outcome of the dumbing-down process of our failing public schools – presume it’s on TV so it has to be accurate and representative. Therefore, there most certainly are a lot of gay couples and blacks whose exposure must be magnified to illustrate that.
And this gives opportunist operations such as Black Lives Matters or any number of the alphabet soup gay rights activist groups, a foundation to press forward with demands for accommodations, be they legitimate or ridiculous.
In this way statistical reality is flipped on its head. Whether due to idiocy of the general population, or intimidation that silences those who do see through the propaganda campaigns, we’re living in a period of tyranny of the minorities.
If you question the legitimacy of this nonstop effort to over-represent minorities and bombard you into submission to their wants and demands, welcome to the contrarian group. You obviously are early, but you are not wrong.
Sam Ross Jr's site 