With this in mind, it occurred to me that a socially useful unregulated investment fund would be one that liquidates companies. The strategy would be: buy long dated put options, acquire stock, replace board, liquidate company. You'd want to start with the most evil ones (Siemens, for instance), but probably need to do the smaller ones first. You would also have to use a bunch of different legal entities to do it, because of the poison pill crap.
Each country has its operational inefficiencies, which tend to go toward creating jobs for people. In the US, you might point out that millions of people driving billions of miles alone is inefficient. The construction and repair of cars and roads, plus all that parking and so on, creates jobs.
In Japan I think it is mostly a highly ceremonial culture and protection for non-competitive industries, like steel.
In England it seems to actually be targeted at just finding stuff for people to do, maybe because employing people is cheaper than putting them in jail. In the US, you'd see 3 construction workers on a small project, in England you'll see 6. Yesterday I saw 4 policemen taking photos of each other. Not sure why they were doing it, but that they were four of them seemed about right. In the subway at rush hour, they have people at every single platform in each station just telling people to move down the platform. In a normal place, this job would be done by a PA system. Plus the headhunter and leasing agent situations: there's no reason why they should be involved in finding someone to fill a job or an apartment, yet they persist, and even thrive.
