Jeffrey Goldberg, the estimable foreign affairs reporter now at The Atlantic, says that when I compare his hard-headedness regarding Iran and Hezbollah to his naivete regarding the financial-advice industry (as I did in a recent Wall Street Journal Taste Page piece, “The New Soft-Bitten Journalists”), I am equating Hezbollah’s evil and SmartMoney’s erroneous stock market advice.

I’m not, and I’m looking not at the quality of SmartMoney’s advice, but the curious inconsistency of judgment in a man with an unusual gift for understanding human nature at its worst. I was surprised that Goldberg’s realism about evil is accompanied by a tendency to think that if people aren’t actively evil, they must be actively virtuous and selfless.

The fact is that most of us reside somewhere in the middle, and that’s why we have policemen, contracts, lawyers and accountants (and some of them are bad apples, too).
But there’s an easy way to test my theory. Let’s persuade Roger Cohen of the New York Times, who is as credulous about the Iranian government and the terrorists it arms as Goldberg is canny, to reveal the results of his 401(K) in the last year. So of course will I. Then we’ll see who did best - the usefully idiotic Mr. Cohen, the selectively brilliant Mr. Goldberg, or me, who can claim no more than a commonsense understanding of both the murderous tyranny of Iran’s regime and the petty inattentions and conflicts of interest in the financial advisory industry - and how both the villanous and the shabby are expressions of human nature. (Though how anyone - even messrs. Cohen and Goldberg - could do worse than I have done in the market recently, despite my wisdom, I cannot imagine.)

Roger? Are you ready? Man up!

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