Your assumption seems to be that people are too stupid to manage their own account and must have the government micro-manage them for them.
I reject that assumption....
Employees at dot.com companies during the hey days became rich beyond belief because they *did not* diversify. Seattle is full of multimillionaire former Microsoft employees who've retired at 30 because they *did not* diversify.
The decision to diversify or not should be left to the individual.
Companies which encourage 401K matching fund investments in their own company, in many cases do so in order to motivate employees to increase corporate performance. It's also a competitive advantage many companies use in order to entice the best of the best to work for them.
Since 401K's have come on the scene, there has been a bonanza of increasing stock performance success stories. Many of these stories can be attributed to the reward employees received due to compensation tied directly to their shares of stock.
Government *forced* answers on the surface may feel good now that we've recently had such a large company fall from grace. If those in charge did do something illegal they should be punished. But, thus far I have seen nothing which clearly pointed to Enron's upper management defrauding anyone. On the surface, it looks like Anderson committed some kind of gross error in their auditing practices. However, given the complexity of book-keeping rules, this may not be the case. We will have to wait for an investigation to determine with certainty what happened there.
Jumping to the conclusion that our government must control 401K investment decisions and diversify them according to some pre-ordained script, may lead to long term degradation of corporate stock performance, and employee involvement, motivation and ultimately corporate success. Shall we allow upper level management alone to benefit from increasing shareholder value?
This kind of thinking where knowledge workers don't have the sophistication, common sense, or understanding of stock investments to make their own decisions is dangerous imo. The nanny state, where mommy big government must protect us from ourselves is nonsense.
People took risks with Enron. It's legal for them to do so. Some lost. Others may have gone short and won. But it was their risk to take, and their life which was effected by their decision.
Let the courts figure out if blame is to be assigned and act accordingly. But let's not blow one companies bancrupsy out of proportion and assume everyone is too stupid to handle their own investment decisions. |
