Legal, Yes. But Moral?

More interesting reporting from the "Occupy" front.

Speaking to several of these protesters today, I met MBA students who cannot find jobs (one even told me his GPA at business school, a respectable 3.2) and law students in a similar predicament. As money gets wasted in epic fashion overseas for desperately flawed ‘provincial reconstruction teams’ in Iraq and risible ‘Government-in-a-Box’ initiatives in Afghanistan, these kids are staring at mountains of debt and an equally daunting lack of viable employment prospects (the MBA student was underemployed working as a barista at Starbucks). So there are intelligent faces and voices in these crowds—not just aimless rabble-rousers out for a rise—and I can sense this movement becoming more contagious  --Dreher quoting Djirejian

And there is context.

...how can it be, after the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression, involving very large doses of financial chicanery indeed, that nothing really of substance vis-a-vis legally actionable import came of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (who even remembers its name, in sharp contrast to Pecora)? Or that the ‘too big to fail’ issue has now only been aggravated further? Or that the CEOs of many of these banks could not even today explain to their own shareholders what products twenty-something employees are peddling, or indeed trading...

...While I will readily confess I find it odd as something of a Burkean that I am sympathetic to these protesters, they are not looking to trot out the guillotines, in the main (although I did spot a “Behead the Fed” sign!), but rather, they have smelled the radicalism of the blows dealt the integrity of a representative democratic system poised by the almost unfettered oligarch-like behavior among too many elites wholly disconnected from, yes, the 99% they speak of. They are acting to secure conservative aims of re-balancing a society that is becoming dangerously unmoored and increasingly bent asunder. They want accountability and dignity and prospects....

Yes, what the banks did was "legal."  So is abortion, remember?

The question asked by TEA Party people and (some) of the "Occupy" bunch is exactly the same one:  should there be a moral governance here?  That's a question which a lot of RadioMouths ignore--deliberately--in their quest for cheap political points.

Many (not all) private-sector actors are amoral; the banks proved that beyond the shadow of a doubt with the mortgage/derivatives games they played. 

Did society, as a whole, benefit from that?