Neither finance nor law are of necessity zero sum activities, although both of them may end up dissipating some wealth in some cases.
Financial markets are what enables society to direct capital toward its most productive uses, and every time you find an arbitrage opportunity, you have just contributed a little to that goal; think of it as Gosplan, except that it actually works. This is perhaps easier to understand in the context of markets in physical goods. A merchant who notices that the difference in the price of widgets in towns A and B is smaller than the cost of transporting them, and starts doing so, is obviously realizing a net gain for society. Stocks and bonds aren't all that different from widgets.
Good laws make it possible for people to rely on contracts with complete strangers, rather than always having to laboriously build up bonds of trust, and they prevent people from imposing costs on third parties that never asked for them. While bad laws may be bad, good laws exist too, and lawyers do occasionally get involved in making them work.
There is a distinction between making the laws and gaming them.
There's a lot of small-government rhetoric out there about minimizing legislation. The analogous point to about minimizing litigation is also plausible.
Financial markets are what enables society to direct capital toward its most productive uses, and every time you find an arbitrage opportunity, you have just contributed a little to that goal; think of it as Gosplan, except that it actually works. This is perhaps easier to understand in the context of markets in physical goods. A merchant who notices that the difference in the price of widgets in towns A and B is smaller than the cost of transporting them, and starts doing so, is obviously realizing a net gain for society. Stocks and bonds aren't all that different from widgets.
Good laws make it possible for people to rely on contracts with complete strangers, rather than always having to laboriously build up bonds of trust, and they prevent people from imposing costs on third parties that never asked for them. While bad laws may be bad, good laws exist too, and lawyers do occasionally get involved in making them work.