Do You Sincerely Want To Be Rich? Read Online Free PDF Page A

sales force, but also the proposition which Dickens expressed in his phrase about the human bees, and how they will swarm when the old tin kettle is beaten.
        Or, as that sceptical Scots philosopher David Hume put it: 'No man need despair of gaining proselytes to the most extravagant hypothesis, who has art enough to represent it in any favourable colour. The victory is not gained by the men at arms, who manage the pike and the sword, but by the trumpeters, drummers and musicians of the army.' Let us go back to the apprenticeship of a master drummer.
        
Chapter Two
        
The Making of a Conceptual Salesman
        
         In which we examine the political and psychological background of Bernard Cornfeld, and the early growth of his talents.
        The most durable of all the legends about Bernard Cornfeld concerns his original financial motivations, and the impulse which started him along the road to Geneva and People's Capitalism. The story is usually told like this:
        Bernard Cornfeld, an idealistic young Socialist, is the son of a widowed immigrant to New York. Fresh from Columbia University, he takes up a post as a social worker in Philadelphia. The exact nature of his duties is not stated, but 'slums' are mentioned. His income as a social worker is slender, and in order to have enough money to take girls out, he begins selling mutual fund shares in his spare time. Now, the young socialist experiences a conversion, he perceives that the open-end investment fund can be made to resolve the cruel contradictions of capitalism.
        Why is it that only the rich can invest in the wealth created by capitalism and thus increase their wealth? It is because the poor have few dollars left over from purchasing the necessities of life. They cannot afford to tie up this slender surplus in investment. To sell shares successfully, you need expert brokers. And there is the eggs-in-one basket-problem: what about the widow who had invested her $50 in the shares of a company which collapses?
        But now the mutual fund salesmen goes among the people. Through him, they are enabled to turn their savings into shares in a Fund. Many mites are thus assembled into a great whole. Wise men invest this ample Fund in the shares of many industrial concerns. And if, as should normally be the case, most of these investments rise in value, then the rise increases the value of each of the shares of the Fund. Thus the savings of the poor are multiplied, without risk. And the Fund undertakes that it will always redeem a customer's shares, immediately, for cash. Thus the advantages of investment are combined with the blessings of its great opposite, liquidity.
        In the legend, at least, Bernard Cornfeld, accepted with religious fervour the excellence of this vision. He has himself recalled the birth of a conviction that 'money possesses a strange kind of purity', and the further conviction that capitalism could now be employed to bring about that equitable distribution of wealth which was the aim of socialism.
        This idealized portrait of the open-end fund mechanism is not totally at odds with reality. But there are some important variations possible, such as the size of the cut that the salesman takes for himself, and the manner of ensuring that the little people's savings are deployed with suitable wisdom. The picture of Cornfeld's youth similarly differs in some significant ways from what actually occurred.
        Cornfeld, did spend the better part of one year as a social worker, but it was nowhere near the slums. He worked amid the middle class as a youth leader, and he had already made his acquaintance with mutual funds before he reached Philadelphia.
        Cornfeld's father, Leon, was a Romanian: he was an actor, impresario and film producer. He must, in the Twenties, have been one of the pioneers of the movie business in Central Europe, he had offices in Vienna and in Istanbul, where Bernard