If you see finance as infrastructure to help other businesses grow (as I do), then it's growth should result in the growth of other industries. Instead what we see is finance growing and other industries declining. To me that suggests a general dysfunction in the role of finance. It simply isn't doing the good it's supposed to.Well, I don't know that I find that very persuasive. Industries rise and fall all the time, for many reasons; the world is a complex place. Perhaps a useful financial instrument now is keeping things from getting worse somewhere else. Or perhaps it will bear fruit in a decade, as one would generally expect with an investment. Such an argument seems hasty without a good understanding of what the relative growth rates of different industries under different conditions should be -- a rather tall order.
I do certainly see the moral distinction between George Soros' currency manipulation and Warren Buffett's shrewd investment, despite the fact that both men made their money with money. But I don't think it would make sense to reckon their true productivity by comparing their fortunes. Likewise, if one is going to suggest general dysfunction in the financial industry, I'm much more interested in what you think it's doing wrong specifically -- where the growth that you think is unhealthy is coming from -- than how big it is.
To talk in concrete terms, I think I read elsewhere that a lot of the recent growth in finance has been in insurance. It seems sensible to me that if a lot of people have lost money, insurance, and its role in mitigating financial risk, would be more important. Without it, we might see people completely unwilling to take on financial risk at all until they had more money, which would be devastating. At a first glance, I don't see anything unhealthy about such an industry's growth being decoupled from the rest of the economy--or even inversely correlated.
And as for the auto industry - they shouldn't have been bailed out either - that doesn't somehow make it better that the financial industry was.
Oh, indeed, I am not arguing that. Both were terribly bad. I was arguing only that a bad, but specific, historical event doesn't make the industry as a whole fundamentally bad. No one would say, "The government bailed out the auto industry -- making automobiles is fundamentally parasitic on society!" I mean, making those particular automobiles, sure. But all automobiles ever? That's overblown. But people do seem to take the financial bailouts as evidence that the industry as a whole is amoral.