[JamesianP]

Financial leveraging is risk. You can lose your principal. Investors pay for building new homes too.

Speculators do need to get burned periodically to correct bubbles though. Especially now. Making money because you bought sooner than someone else could (practically enshrined in the California constitution) is not really adding value so on average should not pay off any better than inflation.

[magicalist]

As your second paragraph is saying, "risk" isn't inherently valuable. That's also what the GP is saying, you just might disagree on the situations it applies to.

[JamesianP]

Yes in that the situations they refer to account for all investment of any kind being "a bad thing", while I criticize certain govt policies. But other than that, same page yes.