Presumably the people poorer than them also feel the same way?
If you look at the numbers - at what percent of people pay what percent of the total collect from income tax - the inescapable conclusion is that a lot of people aren't pulling their weight, and those aren't the highest earners...
You're starting your rebuttal from the wrong point. Those who earn more are indeed contributing more tax. But why are they earning more? Is it that their contribution is worth so much more to society? Doubtful. More, perhaps, that much more, unlikely.
For example in the article the guys earning 30million a year (10% of their gambling wins) are only able to earn large amounts because they're on a buoyant market. It's largely random fluctuations - they win for 15 years and then lose it all (except they don't personally lose of course); others win for 15 days and lose it all.
So, the guys paying the most tax, the investment managers &c. are adding little to overall productivity (except some lubrication which could be provided without the ineffecient losses of traders wages) but are creaming off inordinant amounts of wealth from the top all the time simply because of a mathematical glitch -- if you waited 100 years and analysed the gains of any investment firm I'll guess they do marginally better then inflation but extract far more worth for the traders.
Those doing productive work, even the highly paid Harvard professors are earning pennies compared to the investment teams.
So are the investment managers pulling their weight in society by creaming off the wealth by gambling with other peoples money? I don't think so.
Capitalism means the rich get richer, some clever people manage to use other peoples money to be rich first. The rest of us are being suckered.
You're starting your rebuttal from the wrong point.
No, you are :-) It's not a zero-sum game like a casino. There is value created by the allocation of resources. That's what Warren Buffett does. OK so it's not what LTCM did, but that's a flaw in the implementation, not the theory, of capitalist economics. The gambling metaphor simply doesn't fit.
Capitalist economics is pretty useless as a theory, if it doesn't work in practise then it's no use. Define "work". The purpose of capitalism AFAICT is to make money for wealthy capitalists and it does a pretty good job at that. The social fixes added by governments to avoid the capitalists destroying the workforce (eg social security, min wages, health care) are the only reason it can continue. And now of course we have the bailouts, without which the capitalist economy would be dead already rather than groaning in death pains.
I'm pretty /au fait/ with the concept of borrowing to leverage larger sums of money to optimise efficient growth - floatation works IMO only if those buying have altruistic reasons as well; everything is too open to abuse from the big investors. Efficient allocation of resources is not the net effect IMO.
Another example, I can see how you want to mitigate against changes in currency destroying your profit on a large / long-term cross-border project by ForEx deals, but this isn't only how ForEx is used.
I don't see how gambling doesn't encompass a naked-short-sell (say) unless you have opportunity to influence the market by some insider trading, which is both [normally] immoral and illegal, or predict the market by being privy to some deals before they are made (as in the recent expose of the NYSE network being sniffed).
Capitalism has no "purpose" other than an optimal allocation of existing wealth with the objective of creating new wealth. It's an algorithm or a technology, not an ethical system. This is where many critics of capitalism stumble.
The bailouts are emphatically not capitalism. Capitalism says let the banks go bankrupt, let the investors lose their shirts, they knew the risks, they knew the profits they were making were in return for taking those risks. The bailouts are entirely political (oh shit! we need those Detroit votes!).
No, they think we should raise taxes on people richer than they are. Your political opponents are not crazy, they just have different goals.