So McDonalds is ok because it is at least somewhat restrained by the need to offer a useful good (food) but the financial industry is parasitical and evil and offers nothing of use? Seriously?
Uhm, whatever his other points may be, I can't take him seriously when he lumps all financial institutions together into one group that offers nothing of use.
Sure, you can argue all day against the usefulness of speculative speed trading firms - and even then you'd still have some decent arguments against you - but to argue that financial institution in general offer nothing of use is ludicrous.
Some relevant quotes:
Corporations are at least somewhat constrained by the need to actually provide some service that is useful to people. Exxon provides energy, McDonald’s provides food, etc. The exception to this seems to be the financial industry. These institutions consume vast amounts of wealth and intelligence to essentially no human end. Of all human institutions, these seem the most parasitical and dangerous.
it [the financial system] has interests that are distant or hostile to human goals
This is the textbook definition of utilitarianism:
"Utilitarianism is a theory in normative ethics holding that the proper course of action is the one that maximizes utility, usually defined as maximizing happiness and reducing suffering."
He sees financial institutions as a waste, and therefore consuming vast amounts of resources to no useful or positive effect.
Yeah... it's easy to criticize the financial network. So would you mind if we tacked on an extra N% to your mortgage payment, like you'd expect with less efficient financing? :)
McDonald's isn't "ok", but it's limited in how evil it can be because it has to give some benefit to other people. A hostile AI could be even worse, because it doesn't have that constraint.
The financial system is what provides farmers with the necessary capital to be able to grow the food McDonalds needs to be in business. That doesn't necessarily make them okay either, but isn't allowing people to eat, without having to worry about producing their own food, at least of some benefit as well?
Doesn't 'financial institution' cover a pretty wide gamut? There are small institutions that exist in only a small town, to government owned entities, to giant businesses that span the entire world. Are they all categorically bad? What can be done to make them less bad?
Why not? A 2012 report estimated over 19 trillion dollars in lost household wealth, and contribution toward the largest number of people living in poverty ever recorded by the US Census bureau. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/business-economy-fin...
Well, it's wrong in no small part because the financial industry does, of course, produce something of value. I don't really get how the hard core "finance is fucked up" people imagine that financial firms got started. Do they imagine they were just created by evil aliens or something?
Finance firms provide lots of very sophisticated ways for money to get from people who have lots of money that they don't currently have a use for, into the hands of people who have a need for money they don't currently have.
Note this is a weak claim. I'm not saying anything about the efficiency of this process or whether the financial industry is good or evil or anything. But you can't criticize the finance industry without at least understanding and engaging its outputs.
Computer, per se, are not bad. Computers infected with malware are bad. Infected computers can still do useful things for you - and in the background they'll be screwing you over also.
The argument I would like to make is not that finance is bad intrinsically - as you've said above. The real problem is that the current instantiation of this concept has grown a series of goals of its own, and to fulfill those goals it is doing things that use the common, shared, limited pool of resources of the global economy, siphoning off stuff that the rest of us could put to better use.
In other words, they could perform useful services for us, and they do. It's all the extra layer on top of that that's the problem.
In a strict, mathematical sense, the OP probably exaggerated when saying they are entirely parasitical.
Uhm, well, the financial industry isn't parasitical and evil nor does it have interests that are distant or hostile to human goals. It's just another profit oriented industry that offers services which plenty of entities find valuable enough to pay for.
The financial industry is as evil as any profit oriented industry can be and to single it out as something completely wasteful and parasitic is unreasonable.
McDonalds would do anything to squeeze more money out of its customers. Like most corporations, they profit from manipulating the human masses.