Economics question: what would your response be?

I have had this thread open as a tab in Firefox for the longest time and I haven't gotten a chance to reply until now, so I apologize if I am bringing up an "old thread", but I am only posting the response I didn't get to make a few weeks ago.

Anyway, I think that anyone who decides that he should invest his retirement funds into stocks should make an arrangement with someone who works on Wall Street where he hands the guy from Wallstreet half of his retirement funds in exchange for a swift kick in the rear.

Maybe someone who took business/economics classes knows better, but as far as I can tell, the value of stocks is almost entirely dependent on money people put into them so anyone who expects to gain money through stocks expects to benefit at others' expense. When you invest in stocks, you hand your money over to people who want to make money at your expense. At best, half of the people involved will gain equally and half of the people involved will lose equally, but in reality, it is possible for a few people to gain at a large number of people's expense and it is possible for many people to gain at a few people's expense, and how much they lose or gain does not have to be inline with what other people lose or gain.

The life span of all companies that have ever existed in a healthy economy should follow a normal distribution, so companies should come into business and go out of business. When a company goes out of business, a small number of people who are on top of things will sell their stocks benefiting themselves at the expense of the few people still willing to buy them and those who were not as quick to sell. Since those people still holding stock can no longer sell, they can only recover the funds they "invested" by liquidating the company and distributing it it evenly among their shares. More often than not, the company is not worth the sum of the funds they "invested" (partially because of corporate debt) and they lose money.

People who are managing their retirement funds are people who are not on top of things. As a consequence of this and the fact that corporate lifespans follow a normal distribution, when you invest your retirement funds in stocks, you set yourself up to lose money. It is  therefore illogical to place any funds in stocks when your ultimate goal is to still be able to retrieve those funds at any given point in the future.

By the way, while the rates of companies coming into business and companies going out of business should on average be approximately the same, they really should be roughly equivalent to those in a predator-prey population, so it is a natural occurrence for many companies to go out of business at approximately the same time. It is also a natural occurrence for many companies to come into business at approximately the same time. These are natural events in a free market economy that do not occur a command economy. Of course, the trade off to losing these two events is that your economy no longer benefits from the maximum power principle:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_power_principle#Definition_in_words

Of course, these are my ideas. Maybe someone with a degree in business or economics knows better than me, but having taken several math classes, I am fairly good at math and from all of the reading I have done, this is the situation I see.