What Wall Street’s Critics Miss | David L. Bahnsen

The global finance industry makes for a convenient scapegoat, but its excesses are merely a symptom of our culture’s maladies. Photo: Charging Bull by Arturo Di Modica

World News Trust Editor's Note: I selected this story to provide perspective on two stories recently posted on the World News Trust site: Universal Basic Income: A Thoroughly Wrongheaded Idea by Milton Ezrati for Forbes; and A Universal Basic Income Is Essential and Will Work by Ellen Brown for her website, Web of Debt. To quote John Lennon: "There's no problem, Only solutions." -Francis

National Review Editor’s Note: The following excerpt is the second in a series of three adapted from David L. Bahnsen’s 2018 book, Crisis of Responsibility. It appears here with permission.

Feb. 14, 2018 (National Review) -- Wall Street is a creature of -- not the cause of -- what plagues the culture.

The mere existence of sophisticated capital markets in America is not a negative; it is actually a sine qua non of the American economy. Furthermore, hating Wall Street is nothing new. It has invited public scorn since the beginning of modern finance, because class envy sells, because arrogance and indifference have often emanated from the pillars of finance, and because it is so easy for the press and politicians alike to tap into class frustrations.

However, the job growth made possible by sophisticated capital markets is undeniable. A financed and capitalized post-Industrial Revolution America brought tens of millions of people a decent wage and quality of life. It is a historical fact. Life in America would be unimaginably worse if we banned dealmaking, trading, advising, structuring, and synergizing the capital structure of American business.

Must capital markets in our country be accompanied by systemic risk, brute arrogance, and excessive greed? Certainly not! But we do need capital markets, even though cultural and moral deficiencies in society may be magnified in the world of finance. Such is the nature of things -- the power and material prosperity involved in directing capital markets makes those who do so highly susceptible to excess.

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