Now, this is extremely important, so I want you to pay attention. If you do ANY of the below things, I will officially not question your patriotism ever again. You know that I do it all the time, right? You meet me, and you say something stupid about the neocons, or the war, or our government, or the pernicious influence of Alexander Hamilton and/or Abraham Lincoln, and my brain just goes… pfft. Unpatriotic! It’s totally wrong of me. And yet, I can’t help myself. It’s like a reflex. Just like your reflexive lack of patriotism!
Sorry, sorry. See how that happens?
There’s hope, though. Fake it till you make it, as they say. Let’s get started.
First patriotic thing to do for the Fourth of July, 2008.
1. Join With Me in Catching the Falling Knife that is VTI.
In case you don’t know, VTI is the ticker symbol for a exchange-traded fund called the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index. An exchange-traded fund is like a basket of stocks that you can buy all at once, and VTI basically holds every single stock that there is. Every single AMERICAN stock there is. Because it mindlessly buys everything, Vanguard’s cut of your money is practically a rounding error. And right now, it’s down about nineteen percent. I’m hurtin’ — whoops, I mean, AMERICA is hurtin’ — on this one. So, America needs you to start propping this puppy up.
Now, I’ve done my part. Normally, I invest about fifty dollars a month in VTI through my Sharebuilder account, for my son Max’s education. In June, as the market was diving, I invested a total of about two hundred dollars, as the stock went on sale. And, of course, the stock has just kept going down, and I’m going to keep buying until it stops… probably another sixty or seventy bucks this month and next month, as soon as my (very patriotic) trip to Detroit and Peoria is over and done with. Then, when it goes up, I’ll look like a genius. That’s how the stock market works, you see. Buy low, sell high, and give some love to all our fine value-producing publically traded companies. They need it right now.
Now, how do you do this? Well, there’s many fine brokerage houses, but I like ING Sharebuilder. With Sharebuilder, you can buy fractional shares of an ETF, so it’s almost like buying a mutual fund for four bucks a trade. With the tiny amount of money I have, I can buy pretty strategically that way.
So, once you’ve build up a position of a thousand bucks or so, you can say, “Well, I’ve bought a thousand bucks worth of VTI, but I’m still voting for Obama because those d**n Hamiltonian neo-cons need to get what’s coming to them!”, and I won’t question your patriotism. I may ask skeptically if you’re still building your position in VTI, but that’s it.
2. Give money to politicians.
Won’t someone think of the politicians?
I mean, I suppose you can vote, but that’s the easy part. You need to go all-in in supporting the major parties’ ability to speak without the filter of our idiotic media on all the time.
You see, if you DON’T give money to politicians, they’d need to pander to gigantic media conglomerates to get their message out. If you DO give money to politicians, then they need to pander to you to try and get more money. That’s infinitely better.
McCain never liked raising money, for instance, so he panders to the media instead. Reagan was a money machine, baby. He worked the rubber-chicken circuit for basically his entire life, and thus could say anything he felt like.
Other politicians are like that too. Ron Paul. Barack Obama. Mitt Romney. If they didn’t have money, people would just laugh at them. I mean, they’d laugh at them harder than they already do, and then ignore them. And the country is better off because they have money.
So, I repeat, giving money to politicians is even better — nay, more patriotic — than voting.
3. Stop saying you’re “a Registered Independent”
Who do you think you’re kidding, anyway?
Most people basically vote for one party or the other. In fact, unless you’ve cast a perfectly even number of votes, half of which have gone to one party, and half of which have gone to the other party, you prefer one party over the other. So, stop kidding yourself, and join up with one party or the other.
You know what? Joining a political party is a completely cost-free action. You don’t have to vote for the people in the party you belong to, do you? You can switch at any time, right? So why be independent? Because you dislike both parties? Well, unless you don’t vote, you vote for people who are loyal members of a political party, so you obviously don’t consider it to be a disqualifying personality flaw.
You can even join a third party if you want to. As long as it isn’t one of the socialist cultist ones. Just stop with the independent thing, because you aren’t. You don’t know better than everyone else.
And if you think you do, you’re totally unpatriotic.
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Okay, that’s enough for now. Now go open your account with Sharebuilder! Happy Fourth!
Tags: stock, VTI, patriotism, fourth of july, political parties, sharebuilder, neoconservatism
