In Defense of Finance
This seems more or less like a straw man of people who might loosely call themselves &quot;anti-finance&quot;.  I think most people support and understand the &quot;idea&quot; of finance but not the implementation.<p>One weak point of this article is that it repeats the common pro-finance position that financiers deserve to be wealthy because they take on &quot;risk&quot;.  However, in this day and age we hardly ever let large companies suffer the consequences of a bad investment (or brazen illegal activity).<p>So, if we think bailouts and the like are necessary to prevent society from collapsing, recognizing the finance industry as a crucial component of our economy, what&#x27;s the reason for allowing financiers to keep skimming off the top when they&#x27;re allowed to burden taxpayers with all the risk?<p>Finance is important, and sure, moving money around is hard.  But so is making things.  I&#x27;d like to see people who make things and people who move money to earn income on about the same order of magnitude.  I&#x27;d also like to see companies held accountable when they commit crimes.<p>(also--dismissing viewpoints you disagree with for being too &quot;meta-contrarian&quot; is bad form imo.  Anyone who has criticisms of the way things are is just doing it to be cool?  I&#x27;m going to call this way of arguing &quot;meta-meta-contrarian&quot;)