— BL, Portland
Dear BL: Experience is the best teacher. The second-best teacher is called early education! However, too many schools and teachers have a bias against capitalism.
Between 1957 and 1959, before time began for many readers, I was a full-time student at the University of Dayton and working the night shift (4 to 9 p.m.) at Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Beane’s Dayton office as a margin clerk, earning 90 cents an hour. I had to work because we didn’t have massive student giveaway programs in those days. But that was three score years ago. A lot of water has flowed over the dam since then. The average daily volume was fewer than 2 million shares, and on Oct. 3, 1957, the day before Sputnik was launched, the Dow Jones industrial average stood at 465.
Merrill Lynch was advertising a super-wonderful stock market concept for the general public called the monthly investment plan, or MIP. Merrill designed a delightful and colorful brochure that clearly told the small investor how the plan worked. The MIP encouraged you to research several stocks and select the one or ones that appeared to have good fundamentals. Then you’d invest a minimum of $10 a quarter, and your contributions would purchase whole and fractional shares. The commissions were negligible. So after 20 or 30 years, early investors could have accumulated a portfolio of, for example, 107.765 shares of 3M, 149.679 shares of AT&T, 210.472 shares of American Express, 261.223 shares of Eli Lilly, 202.997 shares of Exxon, 271.669 shares of Boeing, 182.738 shares of Union Pacific, 223.553 shares of DuPont, 188.886 shares of Johnson & Johnson, etc. What a grand idea that educated the average working guy about capitalism and gave him a chance to make the system work for him.
I tried to encourage the Dayton, Ohio, public school system and the University of Dayton to include several courses I had designed about capitalism and the stock market to their curricula. I failed. But imagine how students who would have taken those courses could have benefited today. Capitalism is an important subject our children should begin learning in grade school, but we don’t even teach it in our high schools. Rather, we teach tramp courses such as driver’s ed, ceramics, dance, physical education, band, rhetoric, drama, media studies, Chaucer and cooking. And college courses are far worse, especially when schools have popular basketball and football teams.
