We need casinos, or thank you Bernie for showing us the error of our ways

Pols of all stripes, and the odd economist, rail against our 'casino' markets. In fact if our markets did not resemble casinos we may not have markets at all. Here is why:

1) Counting the skim taken by the finance industry as compensation, commissions and crookedness one finds the economic notion of no transaction costs laughable and one would laugh if one were not crying.
2) I estimate the long run skim at over 3%, which means that the return on equities drops from the around 6% of various academic studies to around 3% - hardly worth the trouble and time to reinvent the Consol.
3) Luckily, skewness comes to our rescue - we can count on the good old human gambling instinct to be beguiled by better odds than slot machines, with the same possibility of a huge return if one spots a Google in time.
5) Skewness also allows various excesses to be written off in one big bath and expunged from track records under the 'vintage' theory - i.e PE funds investing in 2000 all did terribly; that we lost only 15% makes us rock stars.
4) Poor people play the lottery; rich people play the stock market. And the online form is legal in the US with losses tax deductible and gains sheltered.
5) The Houses of Goldman, Morgan (at least the odd avatar) etc. always win.
6) Academic studies all run on sized portolios; I have never seen one that corrects for the denominator - you know that old bank trick - keep growing the denominator so the percentage of bad loans looks tiny. What if all markets are really one big Ponzi scheme that rely on inter temporal trust insured by inflation? Ouch.

Red or black, anyone?