[aurem1]

Your argument is silly for the following reason. Imagine that a firm was able to profit from discrepancies between values of two stocks that last 100 microseconds. Say this firm makes 1 billion dollars a year - it pays 350 million in corporate taxes to society, which is one direct way to measure the value it is adding. Looking at it differently, what value does a pizza cutter provide to society? why not ban pizza cutter production? Why can't people cut pizza with a knife? instead of having all those smart engineers work on making pizza cutters, let them make something worthwhile. Follow this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion and you end up with Soviet Union circa 1975 - i.e. system that does not work