Blaming Cramer Another Sign of Declining Self-Reliance

Jim Cramer is a former hedge fund manager and investment guru who currently hosts a very popular televised investing program on CNBC called Mad Money. Lenny Dykstra is a former ball player nicknamed 'Nails' who had an investment career as dramatic in its disgraceful fall as in its meteoric rise. Though this article goes to some length to claim that Cramer was probably in the dark about Lenny Dykstra's shady dealings during his ultimately doomed investment career, it does suggest that Cramer's endorsement of Dykstra and his methods makes him at least a bit culpable for the damage done by Dykstra. Others have used similar reasoning to blame Cramer for everything from the housing bubble to the flash crash.

However, this line of reasoning overlooks a key factor; though he is an investor by trade, it is important to remember that Cramer is far moreso a television personality at this point. You can call it Mad Money Fever, Dr. Phil Syndrome, or any number of similarly devised names, but it is the tendency of Americans to blindly follow advice, no matter how untimely, unspecific, or inappropriate it may be so long as it comes from a popular TV expert. Therefore, blaming Cramer et al, it is a great example of how America is becoming increasingly and detrimentally reliant upon others in nearly every facet of life.

I am a poor student. I don't have money to invest. However, the hope is that one day, being a poor student now will lead to being at a least a comfortable something-or-another later in life. At that point, I certainly will invest, most likely as a way to build wealth for other things, such as home purchases or retirement. One thing I won't do at that point is sit in front of the TV, laptop in hand, pulling the trigger on every recommendation made by a man who spends more time at book signings and speaking engagements than in front of stock charts. By analogy, next time I am feeling down about being a poor student, I am certainly not going to watch Dr. Phil's diagnosis of a depressed out-of-work alchoholic to help me work through how I should be handling my own problems. No offense to depressed out-of-work alchoholics, it is simply that this advice would (hopefully) not be appropriate for me. Neither should particular stocks from an afternoon TV program be to the average investor.

Jim Cramer may or may not have the cleanest hand in the world when it comes to investing. There have certainly been many allegations against him through the years. However, to blame him for the behavior of his viewers is juvenile finger pointing that does nothing but ignore the fact that one of the biggest problems America faces is a lack of the self-reliance that made this country great in the first place. This problem extends more broadly to other facets of everyday life, most notably government entitlement programs, many of which are of course necessary while at the same time exploited and over-utilized.

How can this be changed? There are clearly no easy solutions. However, it is clear that as long as people depend on the often inappropriate and inadequate advice of others whom they never have, nor never will meet, those others will end up as scapegoats. My sense is that Americans from our Founding Fathers right up until the Greatest Generation are rolling in their graves...