Successful investing is about owning businesses and reaping the huge rewards provided by the dividends and earnings growth of our nation's - and, for that matter, the world's - corporations.

The grim irony of investing, then, is that we investors as a group not only don't get what we pay for, we get precisely what we don't pay for. So if we pay for nothing, we get everything.

Successful investing is about owning businesses and reaping the huge rewards provided by the dividends and earnings growth of our nation's - and, for that matter, the world's - corporations.

The miracle of compounding returns has been overwhelmed by the tyranny of compounding costs.

I'd be the first to agree that capitalism bestows its blessings unevenly. But that wouldn't persuade me to think it was a good idea to do away with those blessings in their entirety. That said, there is lots of work to be done to make capitalism work better, and to broaden its blessings far more widely not only in America, but all over the globe.

I think it's fairly easy to provide a moral defense of capitalism. It has been - over the last 200 years - the underlying basis for enormous increases in productivity and human welfare and rising living standards, particularly in the United States, and in the industrialized nations but in fact, in most parts of the world.

Rely on the ordinary virtues that intelligent, balanced human beings have relied on for centuries: common sense, thrift, realistic expectations, patience, and perseverance.