That's a false premise. The "purpose" of capital markets isn't to "serve society" any more so than the "purpose" of restaurants is to "serve food". Restaurants (and any other businesses for that matter) exist to generate profits. They merely satisfy that goal by serving food, but it could be done a million other ways.
The stock market exists not because of some idealized goal of serving society, but because companies want to sell partial ownership and transfer risk from themselves to the public in exchange for potential future returns on that investment. Anyone member of the public who purchases stock in a company should understand that agreement. It also has secondary benefits like providing liquidity for employees, etc., but the New York Stock Exchange wasn't founded with that purpose in mind. In other words, the stock market doesn't owe you anything.
That point aside, could you clarify how HFT hurts you? If your goal is to use stock markets as an investment vehicle, then your time horizon should be on the order of months and years, not seconds. If that's the case, then HFT has no impact on you whatsoever. If you do want to play in the second time range, then my analogy with F1 racing is perfectly applicable and there's no justification for your complaint.
This is a really dumb way of looking at it. Capital markets are a tool - they are a means, not an end. They are a tool society uses to allocate resources in a sane, equitable, and efficient way. To the extent they accomplish this (and they generally do a rather great job at it), they are a useful tool. To the extent they don't, we are justified in altering the way they function so as to achieve the results we desire. They are an organizational strategy, nothing more.
What they are certainly not, is some higher order of intelligence or ideal that we humans just have to learn to live with, or else. The stock market may not owe me anything, but it certainly owes us something, or we wouldn't use it.
That's not false - capitalism is justified by it's proponents by it's ability to serve the public better than socialism (the majority of the public wants more socialism - entitlements/public services etc). Some aspects of capitalism (copyrights, patents, HFT, pollution) are not serving the public and there are valid arguments from the opposing side.
My goal is to trade daily/weekly (in addition to monthly/yearly). I don't want to seconds/minutes/hours (and so can't many others - so the "competitiveness" of markets is actually reduced).
Ultimately, stock markets exist to raise funds for projects (exits for entrepreneurs, financing projects in large corps) - they occur on the daily-years timeframe, not seconds/minutes/hours.
You say HFT hurts the public, but you only show evidence that it hurts LFT. Why do we care about kow frewuency traders, aka parasites who profit from statistical patterns and not by contributing any value?
By that reasoning, HFT are parasites too. More generally, the stock market exists to allocate resources. Is society already so efficient that millisecond allocation needs to occur?
The stock market exists not because of some idealized goal of serving society, but because companies want to sell partial ownership and transfer risk from themselves to the public in exchange for potential future returns on that investment. Anyone member of the public who purchases stock in a company should understand that agreement. It also has secondary benefits like providing liquidity for employees, etc., but the New York Stock Exchange wasn't founded with that purpose in mind. In other words, the stock market doesn't owe you anything.
That point aside, could you clarify how HFT hurts you? If your goal is to use stock markets as an investment vehicle, then your time horizon should be on the order of months and years, not seconds. If that's the case, then HFT has no impact on you whatsoever. If you do want to play in the second time range, then my analogy with F1 racing is perfectly applicable and there's no justification for your complaint.