He was attacking your statement: "Someone was going to a lot of make money when the British government's scheme unraveled."
I think the point is clear, morality has nothing to do with whether something is definitely going to happen or not. If you're taking advantage of a situation and you deem it immoral, whether the end result would have been the same even if you hadn't participated is irrelevant, it's still an immoral action.
Whether robbery and speculation are equivalent is a different point from the one being made. Obviously analogies aren't perfect, I think most people here realize that from the very definition that analogous situations aren't the same. But it's still a useful tool to make an argument with.
To introduce another bad analogy in to the conversation, eating cheese is not immoral but forcing a 10kg block of cheddar into somebody's mouth is.
Black Wednesday still has political and economic consequences more than 20 years later - the UK is not a member of the Euro and the Right may potentially pull us out of the EU altogether. The (de)merits of both positions notwithstanding, Black Wednesday certainly still has a huge psychological effect on our relationship with the rest of Europe.
Another way of looking at it is this: had the pound remained on the ERM, Britain would have remained on-track to join the Euro. Assuming no devaluation of the pound (the incident that caused Britain to leave the ERM), the pound would have become part of the Euro at a ruinously high exchange rate relative to the Deutschmark. In the financial collapse of 2008, Britain would not have been able to lower interest rates or run quantitative easing. This is basically the predicament that Spain, Italy and Greece are in (though Greece has other problems). They have been forced to carry out "internal devaluation" by cutting spending and wages, and due to the sticky prices effect this basically means making very large numbers of people unemployed.
Of course, you could argue another counter-factual, that Britain within the Euro would have tipped the balance of power in the ECB in favour of a much more doveish monetary policy from 2008, and thus saved Europe from calamity. It's really hard to speculate about these kinds of reflexive dynamics.
Except Great Britain is the sole maker of cheese, and forces under threat of violence the citizens of the UK to pay their taxes and other debts in cheese, and it costs Britain nothing to make cheese.
They didn't force a 10 kg block down any ones throat, they choose of their own volition to buy 10 kg of cheese at price they knew to be outrageous, to maintain their manipulated price of cheese because they are the sole maker of cheese.
So as the sole supplier of cheese they fucked up the market by flooding it with cheese, then realizing what they had done bought fuck loads of cheese that costs nothing to produce to maintain their inflated price of cheese. Fuck them.
His premise is something similar to what I was going to write and then didn't for brevity - the general justification touted for Soros doing what he did is that the British government were incompetent and deserved what they got - it's equivalent to saying the drunk deserves everything he gets because he should have known better. A third party's incompetence isn't a moral justification for your proactive exploration of their incompetence.
So in your mind, there's no difference between engaging in a transaction that both parties enter into willingly, fully in control of their faculties, and robbing a drunken, passed out individual? Because that analogy holds those two things to be equal.
When we abstract away the situation, then it all seems simple - we assume both parties (the BoE and Soros) are willing, aware and self-motivated actors in control of themselves.
However, there WERE other parameters. George Soros clearly believed the government to be incompetent/incapacitated (up against a wall), and took full advantage. It's also a zero-sum game where the loser isn't a single, self-motivated individual - it's a body of taxpayers who aren't explicitly consulted or perhaps even aware of the transaction, which calls into question the "willing, self-aware" parameter. Idealised financial transactions end with "win/lose", whereas ruining a whole economy like that results in years of decreased quality of life for other individuals, which has a moral implication. Soros was undoubtedly aware that his transaction would disadvantage a huge number of people, but did it anyway. He could have acted in such a way that netted him lots of money (a million, 10 million, 100 million) whilst still minimising taxpayer losses, but he didn't at all.
So in pure, simplified transactional terms, yeah fair game. In "big picture" we-are-all-human-beings terms, there's a huge moral hole here.
Sure; I won't argue that it was a jerky thing to do. However, being jerky doesn't make it criminal, and when you say "this is analogous to mugging a passed out rich man in the gutter", you are saying that it's criminal.
Was the British government up against a wall? Yes, but only because they put themselves there. They said "We will buy British Pounds, all you want to sell to us". George Soros said "Well, damn; I bet I can get a lot of pounds. Let's do this." and it turned out that George Soros's ability to borrow pounds was greater than the government's ability to buy them. How is an entity, full of ostensibly smart people, who continually say "Bring it on, I'm not done yet" the same or even similar to a drunken, passed out man? How is somebody who says "You will buy British Pounds? I have some pounds right here; would you like to buy them? Oh, you would? Well hold on, I'll be right back; I bet I can get some more!" the same or similar to somebody who sees a passed out man and slips off the dude's watch?
If a car dealer knowingly sells you a lemon, is it a consensual exchange? I don't think was Soros did was absolutely unethical, but its ridiculous to pretend that it was squeaky clean. One party thought this to be an ordinary transaction; the other party knew it would debase the currency.
Two parties took a bet, as in a poker game. They each though they were doing the right thing. Turns out, one of them had a winning hand and one of them didn't.
But since everyone knew the nature of the game, and everyone knew they were making bets, why is it unethical?
Really, I would think more anger should be placed on the politicians who got monetary policy so drastically wrong. Or maybe anger is wrong - maybe I should say "learn from this". Because heaping anger on someone who outplayed you is a great way to mask the fact that you need to learn.
Its not that I think Soros should be "blamed" per say, it just doesn't speak highly of his character. He put profits before the wellbeing of the British people. Clearly he doesn't feel an ethical obligation to them. I would have.
But you're right. Judging Soros gets us nowhere, drawing lessons from this does.
Keep in mind that the dealer was making the offer to sell, so it's like a push pull or drag sale.
So dealer makes an offer saying "We will give you $10,000 for any clunker, no quantity restrictions, if it has wheels and starts we'll give you $10,000" so Mr. Soros thinks to himself, this is a rediculous offer and starts buying everything on craigslist for less than $10,000. He rolls up with 100 lemons and the dealer buys them, then has a press conference saying he has $15 billion dollars on hand an will buy all the lemons in the world for $10,000 a piece.
So George Soros goes and finds $30 billion lemons and it turns out that the gov't couldn't (or didn't want to) come up with $15 more billion for lemons. Yes, the tax payer got fleeced, but the transactions were made in good faith by people who thought buying lemons for $10,000 was a good fucking idea, and was elected on a fucking platform of buying lemons for $10K.
