Before the mid-1990s VC in fact were responsible for a lot of 0,1 type innovation. Intel, Apple et al. Wall street was not set up to provide asset lite companies debt. Nor was it set up to take public equity deals of early stage, cash bleeding, negative gaap earning early-stage companies. So they filled a market gap, and enabled new deals/businesses to get done.
Since then, the increasing sophistication of general market participants has commoditized everything about VC, except for perhaps certain elements of information flow. In that regard, you are right, that a stage agnostic hedge fund and/or a $NBillion VC funde start to look alike.
But Remember Thiel was in FB as an <Angel> in 2004. Clarium itself was a macro fund, taking positions on open public markets. They are actually quite disctinct lines of work. Its not like clarium was doing later stage VC or PE deals either (from my recollection).
Lastly, someone needs to write the contracts in a free market economy. So Legal and Finance guys are socially valuable. The underlying issue, however, is are they abusing or overleverageing their (privleged) position in the economy to extract opportunistic rents. See, eg.
That's an argument (perhaps for another day), because it is more an ethical/cultural/policy discussion and comes down to how people are educated/brought up, their values, etc. That kind of thing varies from decade to decade, from firm to firm, etc. Arguably, right now across all of what used to be the professions, we are losing the partner ethos, and replacing it with arguably a more a-moral, and mercenary one.
