“In the year of 1284, on the day of Saints John and Paul on June 26, by a piper, clothed in many kinds of colours, 130 children born in Hamelin were seduced, and lost at the place of execution near the koppen.”

We are all familiar with the tale of the brightly-clothed pied piper whose lovely tune was so enchanting as to lure a town’s entire population of children to their premature demise. Few may realize the legend was born of true events. The Lower Saxony hamlet was battling a rat infestation and the pied piper originally labored to rid the scourge in exchange for payment. Rat-free, the townspeople reneged and paid dearly with their children’s lives, or so the story goes.

Listen to investing legend John Bogle and you too might be lulled. Not by music, but by a message that could have you believing that active investing should also have long ago met its own demise. The man is on top of his game with Vanguard, the firm he founded on September 24, 1974, raking in a record $236 billion last year. Total assets under management? A cool $3.1 trillion. (OK, you might should round down considering how this year has started.)

Nevertheless, Bogle makes beautifully salient points about passive investing. Active managers are too richly rewarded. Or in Bogle’s words from a Bloomberg interview last April, active mutual funds are “fat, dumb and happy,” soaking would-be retirees with excessive fees.

In many cases that assessment suits, especially when “closet indexing” is involved. Think handsomely rewarded “active” managers circa 2000 buying into the dotcom revolution’s poster children of profitless phantasmal prosperity. Or jump to present day and picture managers who veered blindly from concentrated to the core in Apple to a deep dive into the FANG stocks that we can all name.

What should be most important to investors is that index investing has proven its merit, outperforming its actively-managed peers. Morningstar tracked 562 actively managed large-cap growth stock mutual funds and 25 passively managed funds in the same asset class. In the decade through yearend 2014, passive outperformed by a significant margin, with average returns of 9.27 percent compared to managed funds’ 8.05 percent.