Hm, I accidentally upvoted this so I may as well leave a comment. The dichotomy between "creating" wealth and "pushing it around" is false, in my opinion. Lots

Hm, I accidentally upvoted this so I may as well leave a comment. The dichotomy between "creating" wealth and "pushing it around" is false, in my opinion. Lots of people make it and it's intuitive, I know, but figuring out the proper value of things, trying to make forecasts about the future, even profiting from differences that shouldn't be there, all this is part of the capitalist meta-system called financial markets. One should not confuse the agency issues, borderline-legal information advantages, or even outright fraud in the markets with the basic activity that sustains them. Think about the alternative: Would you like to have to sit with a dimwit credit officer (= bureaucrat) from a big bank who can then effectively veto your plans? Or would you rather have a lively market that decides on such things? Do you want to do your IPO in a public equity market or would you prefer to try to break into an insider club of old rich people who may never come to understand your funny newfangled business model ("what's internet?!"). German sociologist Georg Simmel wrote an interesting book about money, one of the ideas I liked is that its fungibility dissolves the need for relationships, making us free to choose them, and thus effectively increasing personal freedom. The same, I'd venture, is true for capital markets. By spreading transactions around, they increase your options and freedom as entrepreneur. And for markets to work, you need people actually _in_ the market, like it or not. Figuring out value (as opposed to the going price), identifiying and exploiting inefficiencies, trying to make more intelligent forecasts of likely developments, all these _are_ "real problems" in a market economy. Having intelligent, hard-working people working on them makes the system as a whole more intelligent.