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From time to time people say to me, “Spazmo, what do you know about making investments?” They might mention online trading, five-baggers and “sure things.” I assume that they’ve made an unconscious drift into sexual innuendos, so I stop them from speaking with a quick dog bark followed by my honest answer—don’t invest your money in stocks and please forget that vocabulary you were just using. Responses vary: “Do you expect me to retire to a diet of Ramen noodles,” or “But my children hate me and I’ll need to take care of myself,” and almost always “Did you just bark at me?”

But let me clarify a couple of things:

1. I did bark at you

2. Putting money in an IRA, mutual fund, or money market is a great way to save for your retirement. However, thinking you can play the market yourself is a sign of a big head and some serious wrong-thinking. I mean come on, look at you. Sitting there in your underwear, absent-mindedly fingering a mole on God knows what part of your body… you think you can beat professional investors that handle IRAs? Guys who, on a daily basis, ingest cocaine in chemical permutations that won’t hit the sreet for six years, guys who have a psychotic lack of distraction from a reptillian goal that can be only articulated as the word “more”? You’re gonna beat these guys while sitting at home, listening to Terry Gross interviewing Bela Fleck on Fresh Air? You really think that? Well, I think we should start seeing other people.

Let me give an example of what I’m talking about.

I work as an information professional. I will (hopefully) soon have an advanced degree in Information Science; I spend a lot of time reading about information trends, masturbating furiously to Angelina Jolie, and discussing changes in technology with others in my field. It is through this collective lens that I focus my attention on Apple. Not only does Apple excel at product design, they are leaders in usability and pioneers of ambient design. Overall, they engage users with technology that supports their most exciting endeavors.

Additionally, Apple is only currently at a fraction of their market-share as far as an Operating System goes (compared to Windows), and their move into chic appliances such as the iPod has awarded them a cult-like following of customers. I tend to look at those kinds of features in a company because I don’t know any better and because, like many people, I assume that what I know is more interesting and important than what other people know. At least when I drink. But I don’t know and I’m really glad because for all the great things Apple has going for it, there are some underlying givens that I assume exist. One being that their computers won’t explode into flames.

So go ahead and log on to your twenty-minute-delayed day-trader site.

To me, this is like having the carpet pulled out from under me. Probably felt the same to Apple . At least I hope it did. Though there hasn’t been a significant drop in Apple stock, this kind of quality and safety-check negligence can be catystrophic to companies, and those issues are handled internally. And here we are—externals.

“Gee, Spaz, are you saying we should just give up completely?” Yes, that is precisely what I’m saying. Understand that you are in a representative democracy where your vote elects a Freedom Professional to handle issues for you. Your Freedom Professional may not do what you want, because your vote doesn’t count. But she will make sure that your entire community doesn’t experience a huge, unpleasant jolt because your collective vote DOES count. The stock market works in a similar way. The first step to reaping the benifits of our great system is to acknowledge that most of us only have power as a collective.