Having no national system of catastrophic health insurance, we have, through the courts, managed to patch together pieces of a not very satisfactory one.

The first American insurance company was the Friendly Society for the Mutual Insurance of Houses Against Fire, founded in Charles Town in South Carolina, in 1735.

Rule of thumb: The more trimmings an insurance plan has and the harder someone is pitching it, the faster you should run.

Man's natural life span, 75 to 90 years or so, has not increased. It is the number of us who manage to attain it that has increased.

Not surprisingly, the insurance lobby recoils in horror at the prospect of automatic coverage (including, when it was first proposed, Social Security), no matter how efficient it may be. Automatic coverage eliminates sales commissions and profit.

I was a writer for 'New York' magazine. I had been to business school, but what did I know? Still, everybody from the receptionists on up to the editor would ask me what they should do with their money.

But successful investors tend to be not too self-destructive. They tend to be patient, they tend not to follow the crowd, and they tend not to be too guilty about winning.