EXCERPTS:
"Just as every day is followed by a setting sun, every financial turmoil is followed by seething politicians blaming the economic woes on "speculators."
Of course, each investor -- from the 15-year-old who uses his paper-route earnings to buy a U.S. Savings Bond to Warren Buffett -- is a speculator. Each one assesses the future and puts his money (or money entrusted to him) in those assets that he believes promise the best ratio of return to risk.
And because risk there will always be -- because the future is never perfectly predictable -- every investor is a speculator.
So when the German government recently blamed "speculators" for the falling value of the euro, it, in fact, blamed investors.
But blaming investors sounds lame and uninteresting. So the word "speculators" is trotted out in an effort to fool voters into thinking that a special species of financial ghouls suddenly materialized to wreak unjustified financial havoc.
Such accusations, though, are always and everywhere excuses for politicians' harmful intrusions into the economy....
