I agree that liquidity and information aggregation are benefits to society. I just don't think that they're what a hedge fund is getting paid for, and don't see

I agree that liquidity and information aggregation are benefits to society. I just don't think that they're what a hedge fund is getting paid for, and don't see any particular reason to think that the pay of hedge fund managers is (or should be) justified by those benefits. I didn't say, didn't mean, and don't think, that the stock or futures markets are zero-sum games. I think that some things that happen in those markets are very close to zero-sum. And, for the avoidance of doubt, I am not objecting to the existence of hedge funds nor to (most of?) what they do. It is unclear to me how the activities of our hypothetical sports talent-spotter actually have the beneficial effect you describe. If she works for team A (and not for team B) then what happens isn't necessarily that A gets equally good players by spending less; more likely A has a fixed budget and gets better players, while B spends the same as before and gets worse players (because more of the good ones are now being taken by A). The overall quality of play stays about the same -- the teams, collectively, have the same players. The overall spending stays about the same -- each team has whatever budget it has. It's just that A is now doing better relative to B. I'm sure there is a bit of overall benefit. For instance, the talent-spotter's activity slightly drives up the relative compensation of the better players, which means more correlation between pay and performance, which might eventually mean slightly better selection of who gets into professional sports in the first place, which would actually lead to better play overall. And perhaps making A do better relative to B means that in future A will have more budget and B less, and maybe that benefits everyone somehow. But this all seems like second-order stuff, and again it isn't what the talent-spotter is being paid for.