[gjm11]

Did you perhaps miss the bit where I said "Of course, none of these systems works perfectly in practice, and sometimes that's because some individual's self-interest ends up having too much influence on the outcome. Some or all of the systems might want changing to encourage participants to act less self-interested somehow." ?

I wasn't saying "there's never anything wrong with selfishness" or "systems that try to make selfishness produce results that benefit everyone never get exploited" or anything of the kind. Just pointing out that "look, people are being self-interested rather than aiming to serve the greater good" isn't on its own a good objection.

I also wasn't arguing that there should (in any of these domains) be no regulation. There should be, and as it happens there is. Perhaps there should be more. That's an entirely separate question from whether a basically-adversarial system in which all the lawyers are out to win is a good thing.

So far as I know, it's an open question whether justice is best served by a purely adversarial system in which everyone argues for a particular outcome, or a purely investigative system in which no one is supposed to be on one side rather than another, or a basically adversarial system with a bunch of rules that aim to take some of the edge off (which is what we have now), or some other intermediate thing. It's not the sort of question you can resolve by saying "You can't do that -- it means everyone just cares about winning!" or "You can't do that -- it relies on people ignoring their own interests!".