Re: Big purple digit

In article <memo.20080416232339.1884C@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
John Dallman <jgd@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>Say I own 100 shares in XYZ, a trivial fraction of the company's value. 
>I bought them at $10, they are now worth $12.5 because the share value 
>has gone up. I sell them, I have made a profit of $250. Something has 
>been created, because that $250 wasn't taken away from anyone else, but 
>I don't know if you call it money or value. 

It seems to me that the $250 was in fact taken from someone else:
Whoever bought those shares when you sold them.  They didn't just 
vanish into the ether.

(I remember an episode of the TV show _Veronica Mars_ which addressed
that very issue.  Veronica had joined a high school investment club,
and the faculty member who ran the club had a lot of money in a real
estate scheme.  In the course of another investigation, Veronica 
discovered that the scheme was in fact a massive fraud.  Before going
to the SEC, she told the teacher about it, and advised him to sell.
But the teacher pointed out that by doing so, he'd just be offloading
his own loss onto innocent people, in effect perpetuating the fraud;
he felt the ethical thing to do was to hold on to his shares.

(Early in the episode, the teacher had shown his students a picture
of a yacht.  The teacher had been planning to retire early and live
on the yacht.  The last we see of him is taking the picture down
and crumpling it.)

-- 
   David Goldfarb          |"Why must you take everything good and true
and
goldfarb@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
  | honest and wholesome and turn it into a vague
goldfarb@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 | Alan Arkin movie reference?"   -- MST3K