It’s very hard to make a connection between one man’s actions and the other man’s suffering due to those actions. For a hedge fund manager it’s difficult to link his actions to a suffering of a small town teacher. His thinking goes: I exploit market discrepancies, I make money and pay taxes, I donate to charity. He may even think: I am genuinely a nice guy and I really want to help. It’s hard to trace the root of the problems back to himself and his colleagues and industry peers. That would require the rethinking, perhaps painful and unwelcome, of his entire existential premise: is he as good for the society as he thinks he is? And if he’s honest with himself, he will realize that the answer is not necessarily yes.

I wrote recently about how hedge funds these days, rather than engage in honest betting on markets are instead seeking to extract value at the expense of the communities, bully others for value or simply seek rent opportunities. None of those activities produce anything of value; they strip value from the existing caches. Then they use various tax loopholes. And then they donate to charity, being under the illusion that it can cure social ills and because, you know, they are not monsters.

That’s the model we’ve had for some time.

But here comes the danger. In another illuminating Bloomberg article (Bloomberg columnists are really on a roll, finding their mojo recently), we’re risking societal breakdown if we continue on the present course. This sentiment has been widely explored on the pages of my blog, but this article summarizes my thoughts in a concise and trenchant manner. Over the course of history many societies have reached this point. Many got out of this rather unscathed, if they embarked on the policy of alleviating the social and economic discrepancies (New Deal), many others have experienced a more painful chain of events.

I want to stress, again and again, that helping the poor does not turn us into Commies and socialists. It merely helps smooth out such transitions, it is in the very interests of those hedge fund managers. Blaming the poor, the unemployed and food stamps recipients on the lack of alpha is disingenuous and counterproductive.