One of the most depressing things I've heard in my life came from a VC type around 2007. He basically told me straight up that working hard to build a real bus

One of the most depressing things I've heard in my life came from a VC type around 2007. He basically told me straight up that working hard to build a real business with real value was a sucker's game. Every example he'd seen of people making real money was -- as he put it -- from "equity plays." By equity plays he basically meant this kind of thing. I started calling it "hype, leverage, flip." If it were just a lot of harmless hot air that would be one thing, but what's really happening here is wealth transfer from honest and productive sectors of the economy and from the long-term savings of the population (e.g. pensions) into the chip stacks of high stakes gamblers. Throughout history, gambling has always been one of the favored pastimes of decadent nobilities. Today's gambling is particularly clever, as it has the outward appearance of productive work. I cannot help but see today's financial elite in powdered wigs, and probably merkins too. Guillotines can't be far behind. Luckily there are a few honest VCs and angels, as well as a new emerging financial system built around crowd funding and peer to peer finance. That's the future. When the guillotines fall -- literally or metaphorically -- the new distributed financial system will take over in the same way that mercantile and industrial financial systems took over after the fall of Medieval feudalism.