You have to overlook a lot of reality to cling to those illusions, Gunsmoke; my hat's off to you. First off, the biggest benefit from your 401(k) is not its market performance, it's your employer's matching contribution. If you want to get that, you have to stay in the employer-backed plan.

Second, there is no such thing as "beating the market," notwithstanding the fact that the people who administer your plan take large percentages of your money based on the notion that they will manage the fund so well that you will more than make up for the fees they skim off the top. That's simply false, over the long run; as has been well-demonstrated, even a stock-picking monkey can beat the market sometimes (and beat the well-paid "Wall Street guys" most of the time).

And as my earlier post pointed out, you can't win with a do-it-yourself approach, either. The system is rigged. Ever try to subscribe to an IPO? How much capital do you have to invest in single stocks? What influence will your 2 shares of Citi Group have on curbing its insane compensation policies? And what is your stock in GE worth when there are "sovereign wealth funds," hedge funds, etc., placing unregulated, off-the-books wagers on whether it defaults on its bonds or not? Not to mention the ability of all of the large investment banks to make money on short sales whenever they want, by simply taking a short position and starting a rumor.

So you can't opt out. Not many defined-benefit pensions anymore, Social Security is not meant to be enough to live on, and even if you were willing to give up the employer match that comes with your company 401(k), an individual investor who isn't handling a fund at least in the high nine figures has zero chance of competing fairly in an unequal system.

The best you can do is to go into an index fund; they charge lower fees and in the long run you won't do any worse than any other fund.

No sense even trying to address your repetition of the falsehoods about poor people and Fannie Mae causing the economic collapse; one thing I've learned is that once someone has absorbed that bit of right-wing idiocy, facts, logic, and reason have nothing whatsoever to do with the conversation.