The Blinders of Thinking You Did It Yourself

We attribute good results to our own intelligence and good decisions, and we attribute bad results to poor luck or circumstance. This is the nature of man.

Cassandra Does Tokyo captures some of the fallacy of this narcissism in a recent post:

Giving is easy - taking is hard
http://nihoncassandra.blogspot.com/2015/03/giving-is-easy-taking-is-hard.html
...How quickly investors forget. If you'd asked large asset owners in late 2008, or early 2009: "Would you give up a tranche of the future capital gains in asset prices in exchange for a floor under prevailing prices, and the near-assuredness of significantly higher asset prices in the future?", I am quite sure of the answer, given the widespread systemic fears and paucity of alternatives at the time. Investors, after all, pay 2&20 to HFs and PE for essentially the same (pre-tax) premise. Was not QE effectively the same proposition multiplied across the entire economy? The liquidationist alternative was clearly unpalatable to asset owners, and sub-optimal for nearly everyone else. IF, as the result of a policy directive, you bestow large windfall gains, it would be only fair to harvest a an additional share of those for the Public's Interest, since the goal of QE policy was NOT to further stoke inequality, nor accelerate the growth of fortunes for existing asset owners, but rather to prevent unnecessary liquidation, and deflation so private-sector balance sheet deleveraging could work its course, and to foster stability, so reviving private investment decisions in the real economy. But, as it happens, giving is far easier than taking away - irrespective if you're a welfare deadbeat (not my language) or a leveraged rentier...
...Asset owners peculiarly act as if such windfalls somehow resulted from their own brilliance. Many, through every over-leveraged fault of their own, were a pubic-hair's breadth away from financial obliteration, saved by US - and I don't mean the United States, but rather you, and I, as representations of the taxpayer, or bag-holder as the ultimate underwriter of newly issued debt. Others - particularly in the tech world and on the left coast - are blind to the benefits wrought by munificence of The People, and the abundant liquidity finding its way into every inane crevice, and spilling over to provide VC's and PE investors exits at multiples unimagined even three years ago. And the "thanks" that all those west-coast libertarians afflicted with self-attribution bias, is to piss on the under-class who serve them, and wish for a Randian offshore tax-haven to insure they share as little as possible with the undeserving multitudes. These gripes are academic, but asset-owners would do well to reflect upon their self-attribution bias...