On Topic: No such thing as a free lunch

During the course of dinner, a friend mentioned she'd just attended one of those financial advice luncheons - you know the kind you “win” after dropping your business card into a restaurant fishbowl, where you're invited to free chow while listening to a pitch about financial investment products.

She was especially excited about how the presenter had revealed to the lunch crowd “the secrets that they don't want you to know about.”

She couldn't recall any of these “secrets” right off hand, but they had to do with “stuff in Europe.” That kind of thing.

She figured I knew these secrets, too, being the business editor at a daily newspaper.

Oh, my.

Now, don't get me wrong: Our friend is bright and has made her way in the world to feed and clothe herself and her family. Now she's seeking some additional financial guidance.

And these informational lunch-sales pitches can be of good value for folk hoping to gain some control over their financial future - they can show you some options maybe you'd not considered, and introduce you to honest financial counselors.

But this notion of unlocking the mysteries to some hidden Land of Riches, known only to a private elite, complete with guarded handshakes and whispered chants - and maybe a fez - well, sorry. There's no one Kevin Trudeau-like diet book for money, no magic decoder ring.

Learning about investing is just like anything else. Suzanne Farrell, one of George Balanchine's most famous ballerinas, once noted, after being praised for her “luck” in having such talent, that it also requires showing up to work on technique eight hours a day, every day, week after week, for decades ….

If our friend wants to find out about the ever-shifting sands of the business world, I told her to try this very daily newspaper. Alongside stories on Corridor companies, we also run features on the Federal Reserve and the latest high-jinks on Wall Street, as well as why you should care about what happens in Ireland and Greece.

The national dailies, too, in print and online cover the “mysteries” of the money world - the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. Weekly business magazines (not having muddied their mission as much as news weeklies did years back) still can do a fine job of connecting the dots - look at the Economist.

As with so many undertakings, it's not complicated. Of course, that's not the same as saying it's easy.

I realize as I claim that the world of finance is not a private club, there are those at the very top who prove me absolutely wrong.

As the Occupy Wall Street movement continued to gain worldwide exposure, and inch up in public sentiment - when they weren't diluting their own message by meandering off about spy drones and such - some members of that moneyed club went on the offensive.

“I am a fat cat, I'm not ashamed,” declared Ken Langone, co-founder of Home Depot and a self-proclaimed 1 percenter, to Bloomberg News a few weeks ago. Chimed in Tom Golisano, billionaire founder of Paychex Inc., the payroll processing corporation: “If I hear a politician use the term ‘paying your fair share' one more time, I'm going to vomit.”

“Instead of an attack on the 1 percent, let's call it an attack on the very productive,” said John Allison IV, a director at America's ninth-largest bank, BB&T Corp.

In an open, post-Thanksgiving letter to President Obama, Leon Cooperman, former Goldman Sachs money-management unit CEO and now Omega Advisors chairman, wrote: “The 1 percent are not the scourge that they are too often made out to be. (They are not) a monolithic, selfish and unfeeling lot.”

Indeed, Cooperman added, these “moneyed Americans” manufacture merchandise that “fill store shelves at Christmas.”

In other words, hey, the super rich are people, too.

We'll have to see how this counterattack by billionaires plays out in the long let's-soak-the-rich tax war. But some of this chatter among the top tier of our upper echelon - this lack of, shall we say, grace - reminded me of something.

And that was America's first poster boy for capitalism, Oliver “Daddy” Warbucks.

“Daddy” Warbucks was the self-made gazillionaire hero of the phenomenally long-running newspaper comic strip, “Little Orphan Annie” (1924-2010). He would drop in to save Annie from certain death at the hands of evil doers - plights on occasion brought about by her association with the mega-rich Warbucks himself.

Warbucks made his money in many ways - some of those schemes were quite kept mysterious and unexplained. But he remained unrepentant.

In one 1937 sequence, Annie comes upon “Daddy” in his counting room where the kingpin is gazing upon massive heaps of diamonds, emeralds and rubies. Admits Warbucks: “Yep, quite a fortune - more than any one man should have, as those with little say of those who have a lot - till they too get a lot.”

Many times the notion of sharing Warbucks's wealth comes up, especially when the strip was in the hands of its creator, Harold Gray. But chipper Annie - an orphan, remember, and frequently shown down to her last dime while sleeping on a grim city heating grate - never misses a beat to proclaim that as long as she's capable of hard work, she'll take no handout.

“Liberal giving brings happiness to others,” Warbucks opines. “It may warm my vanity, but it brings me little pleasure. No, Annie, no amount of wealth can buy happiness.”

But, as time goes on in the comic strip, even “Daddy” comes to believe his wealth has a part to play in society. One example is through R&D of various unspecified technology - which in turn will make him richer.

“It's my fortune that I propose to spend in an effort to help mankind - if that's being a sap, I'm proud to be a sap,” he declares.

Leapin' lizards.