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.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunism
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.
I suppose my brother and I are great examples of your point: I left engineering to become a lawyer, and he took his physics degree to an investment bank. More money in law and banking. But is engineering or programming really more socially valuable, as practiced? Like many engineers, I used to work in defense contracting--I feel someone more socially valuable as a lawyer, and that's saying a lot. Where does a talented programmer go these days? Silicon Valley? Where the big, world-changing work everyone seems engaged in is exploiting private information for advertising profit? I'm not sure if I believe that's any better for society.