OK, so now we&#x27;ve switched from &quot;why can&#x27;t we just agree that what you deserve to be paid is exactly what others are willing to pay you&quot; to some combination of that with &quot;you deserve to be paid more if you&#x27;ve invested more time and effort&quot; and &quot;you only deserve to be paid for things that aren&#x27;t actually illegal&quot;.<p>The trouble with the second of these, as an ethical principle, is that it offers no way to decide what to make illegal in the first place. Suppose your legal system has carelessly failed to forbid murdering people for money; then doing so meets all of your criteria (people will pay for it, doing it well surely requires an investment of time and effort, and it isn&#x27;t against the law). Someone arguing against it will have to make <i>exactly the kind of argument</i> you&#x27;ve objected to here: &quot;Murder-for-hire is a bad thing even though people will pay for it, because overall it makes the world a worse place.&quot;<p>You may reasonably be completely untroubled by this if you think your legal system, as it is now, perfectly captures all the moral principles it&#x27;s reasonable to care about. Personally, I am not convinced that any actually existing legal system does this.<p>&gt; I understand your argument but just disagree that anything unethical is going on.<p>OK. How do you feel about the ethics of the situation in my fable? The first person who realised that he could get more money by putting up a big net that extends over his neighbour&#x27;s garden: anything wrong with that? Are you happy with the final result, where the overall amount of money everyone&#x27;s getting is the same but lots of people are having to work very hard to make it be them rather than someone else who gets it?<p>I&#x27;m not sure I&#x27;d exactly say that hedge funds, or indeed the money-collecting businesses in my fable, are acting <i>unethically</i>. If they didn&#x27;t do it, someone else would and the situation wouldn&#x27;t be any better. But I would say that the overall result is a pretty terrible one. What we have here is a <i>coordination problem</i>: you have lots of people acting in individually-reasonable ways, and the overall outcome is much worse than what you&#x27;d get if by some magic everyone could agree to act so as to produce a mutually-better outcome. (E.g., just letting the money carry on falling from the sky.)<p>(The best answer we currently have to large-scale coordination problems is regulation enforced by the government. That has plenty of problems of its own, of course.)