Fine. 49%. Whatever. I think you're totally missing my point.

My point is not that there aren't people willing to buy the stock once it's out there. My point is that those people are insane.

Okay, that's not really true. There are enough people out there that the whole system has an internal consistency that allows for liquidity.

But the money used to buy stocks never comes back out of the stock market. I cannot sell off my interest without someone coming in to fill my place. At a casino, to take an example not intended to be a gambling comparison, I buy chips from the casino to gamble with. At the end of my day, I sell those chips back to the casino. If the casino worked like the stock market, I'd have to find some other individual to buy my chips from me instead.

I guess what I'm saying is that you never really get out of the stock market until you find some sucker to take your place.

I realize that a lot of these arguments do apply to government-issued money, too. But that's an argument that I'm going to wait on for now, and, at this point, assume that US Dollars are real money.

And I'm not being dense. I know how people currently make money in the stock market. I'm not denying its existence. The problem is that no one has yet shown me how a stock is not virtually completely divested from the company that issued it.