Had some very heated discussions about the stock markets, morality, and taxation this afternoon.
I despise it when people who don't really understand something are so passionate in their beliefs on the issue. This seems to happen mostly because the person in question has some deep-seated beliefs that are strongly validated or rehashed by the argument. "Rich people are bad", or "making too much money is a sign that you're stealing from the poor" seemed to be the concepts that underlied most of the arguments today.
The stock market is not just a gambling house; if you want to describe it as "informed gambling" then almost anything is a gamble. If you enter any system (and actually put your hard-earned money into it) without understanding what you're doing, there's a good chance you're going to lose it. Stock market regulations are not perfect, just as legal systems are not perfect. Some people have gamed the system to make money in insidious ways that will soon (hopefully) be outlawed 1. No doubt others will come up with even cleverer methods to make money. But that doesn't mean that the stock markets themselves are somehow morally wrong.
All of this seems to stem from a basic idea that (a) rich people are bad, and (b) rich people seem to make lots of money from the market: cue the "inequality is growing" tagline - which is something I'm not entirely sure of in any case 2,3. Something, they say, must be wrong. Surely, the big, bad, rich people are using this corrupt system to make even more money. No.
Bad people may be rich, but if you make the argument in reverse, you are simply, logically, absolutely, thus congruently, wrong. Saying that some rich people make lots of money from the market is right; that's how many of them made their fortunes in the first place - they're rich because they're good at making money.
There was also a claim made that rich people are "bad" because the infrastructure that they stand on, that allows them to get rich, is inherently "bad" (and it influences said rich person), because it is (clearly) aimed at making money and nothing else. Note the implicit assumption that making money is automagically a bad thing. Don't even get me started.
There's a lot more I want to say about this, but I really should do more research before I do so.
References:
[1] http://www.reuters.com/video/2014/04/03/reuters-tv-breakingviews-michael-lewis-unplugged?videoId=303233495&videoChannel=117766
[2] http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=3629
[3] http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/123566
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