We’ve all seen loan sharks in movies, and they aren’t very attractive characters. What they do is not unlike stock brokers. They first give you some money, but then they want it back on time, with interest. This one-to-one relationship makes the deal very transparent. The stock market is more complex, but it’s essentially the same thing: the only way you can profit is from someone’s loss.

Let’s say you’re a successful investor in the stock market. What does that actually mean? It means that someone created a company, worked hard to sustain it, then decided to go public with it to be able to expand it, and thus sold shares in the company. What you’ve done is bought those shares cheap and sold them to suckers at a much higher price. Thus you profit.

So you make money by investing money, but what does that actually mean? You haven’t created anything, haven’t created any wealth. Haven’t performed any service. Haven’t delivered a product of any kind. You’ve essentially done nothing. You solely profit at someone else’s loss. So the stock market is like a lottery, only with good odds. Most lose, some win.

Of course, you could say that as long as people go into the market willingly, and abide by the rules of the game, it’s fair that one person wins what another loses. Still, is the profit anything to be proud of?

Norway has a lot of income from selling oil and the government decided at some point that it would be wise to collect some of these profits to set aside for the future. It’s called the Oil Fund. But they haven’t sat on the money idly, they decided to invest it, mostly in bonds. Now, ironic as it is, considering Norway’s reputation that it’s the oil reserves that have made the country wealthy, the government now actually profits more from trading bonds than it does from oil mining. Here’s a whole country whose welfare is based in part on trading bonds, buying cheap, selling expensive.

There’s nothing very odd about this, it’s the times we live in. But how could this possibly be moral? One government directly benefiting from the losses of others?