I was reading Dean Baker’s excellent post today on high speed trading. My initial reaction was that this was simply theft, high frequency traders supply absolutely no value to anyone but reduce the gains made by legitimate traders.
The first comment, however, made me think. SteveB asks “I don’t understand how the tax solves the problem. Wouldn’t it just increase the spread between buy and sell prices, and make the exchange even less efficient?†This would be an instance where the government and private thieves are doing almost exactly the same thing. So why are they different?
An easy way to answer this is to compare what the government does to overhead. While the private thieves are simply skimming other peoples money a new government tax is more like a business adjusting how it applies overhead across its various business units. The new tax assigns more of society’s cost to the trading sector while allocating the costs away from other productive activities.
While perhaps not the best way to describe government’s role, the overhead analogy does bear a certain appeal for communicating government’s role to the business minded. As organizations grow larger and more complex their direct costs tend to decline while overhead increases. A local mechanic shop is likely to have very high direct costs and low overhead compared to a company like Ford, yet Ford will be far more efficient despite so much of its costs accruing to overhead.
Something similar is happening as government’s role expands. Modern society is vastly larger and more complicated than it was a few centuries ago. Modern businesses require employees with a much larger capital investment, does anyone think the graduates of a one room schoolhouse would be qualified for a Wall Street trading job? Modern capital markets are vastly more complex and trust between corporations requires a much more active oversight role today than it did in the past. I could go on ad nauseam, but the basic point is that modern businesses exist today only as a result of a large supply of social and institutional capital. Without this capital many would still exist but in a much smaller and less productive form.
