The Gadfly Gene

Jack Bogle, profiled in Business Week, is still crusading on behalf of not-yet-rich investors, urging lower fees and simpler investment programs. Bogle's yen for low investment expenses may be inherited:

If there's a gadfly gene, it runs in Bogle's family. Way back in 1868, his great-grandfather, Philander Banister Armstrong, needled his fellow insurance executives. "Gentlemen, lower your costs!" he challenged in a speech. In 1917, Armstrong, whom Bogle calls his "spiritual progenitor," published a 258-page diatribe called A License to Steal: How the Life Insurance Industry Robs Our Own People of Billions.

For Good Friday, Business Week offers a quote worth pondering from a speech Bogle made in Washington, D.C.:

Once a profession in which business was subservient, the field of money management has largely become a business in which the profession is subservient.

Arise, fiduciaries! You have little to lose but your chains.