Generally, we have translated greater output in the few hours of work per week over the last century. And that's a good trend of the future. But we do have to have a system that, as output of goods and services keeps increasing per capita, that it takes care of the people who are willing to work and really are not getting by very well with a family on a 40-hour week.
Part of making good decisions in business is recognizing the poor decisions you've made and why they were poor. I've made lots of mistakes. I'm going to make more. It's the name of the game. You don't want to expect perfection in yourself. You want to strive to do your best. It's too demanding to expect perfection in yourself.
I have this complicated procedure I go through every morning, which is to look in the mirror and decide what I'm going to do. And I feel at that point, everybody's had their say.
In some corner of the world they are probably still holding regular meetings of the Flat Earth Society. We derive no comfort because important people, vocal people, or great numbers of people agree with us. Nor do we derive comfort if they don't.
I would say it's more important who the treasury secretary is than who the vice president is. If you want to have a debate here, I'd like a debate between potential treasury secretaries than the vice presidential debate.
But, surprise - none of these blockbuster events made the slightest dent in Ben Graham's investment principles. Nor did
they render unsound the negotiated purchases of fine businesses at sensible prices. Imagine the cost to us, then, if we had let a fear of unknowns cause us to defer or alter the deployment of capital. Indeed, we have usually made our best purchases when apprehensions about some macro event were at a peak. Fear is the foe of the faddist, but the friend of the fundamentalist.
You have hedge funds and people like that buying these assets to yield 15 or 20 percent, I mean, that's the buyer for these people that are trying to unload them.