[derektank]

This is obviously not directly related to the original article, but I don't understand what you mean when you say stock trading isn't useful. Do you mean brokers aren't useful? I don't understand how this could be the case when many people want to own stocks (one major reason being that they want to be able to draw on capital gains to provide income in retirement, either personally or institutionally as part of a pension).

[sapphicsnail]

This is _not_ my personal opinion but I think people would argue it doesn't produce anything. If you hold that making money isn't inherently useful a lot of businesses don't make sense. Brokers are just trading abstracted pieces of companies around whose value is subjective. I've heard it described as Pokemon cards for adults.

[BrenBarn]

I'd argue that most people don't "want to own stocks". What they want is (to go from your example) "to have a comfortable life even when they're not working anymore". They just want stocks because that's an available mechanism to achieve that. Similarly people don't want to sit in cramped airline seats, but there aren't available alternatives in many cases.

Capitalism prioritizes making money, not satisfying people's needs and wants.