Trying to ban “obscene” profits is a bad idea.

Whoever said that money can't buy love might have had Goldman Sachs (GS) in mind. This week, Goldman Sachs reported its latest quarter of spectacular profits—close to $3.5 billion for the bank, $384,000 in compensation for each employee for the first half of this year—and, right on cue, the braying started for the heads of the Goldmanites. Earlier this month, Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi, in a comprehensive exercise in conspiracy mongering, primed the pump of outrage with "The Great American Bubble Machine." Now a chorus of supporters has chimed in, shocked that amid the troubled economy the evil Goldman could turn out profits like this.

The rhetoric of the outrage has come full circle: Where, before, the villains were the banks that were stupid and greedy enough to fail, now the villains of the moment are those—a very small club, basically just Goldman and JPMorgan Chase (JPM)—that have been smart and greedy enough to succeed. What started as an effort to keep the financial industry from repeating its mistakes has turned into—as it has at other points in history—an attack on the idea of trading profits. It is no longer enough that the banks should be reformed; the opportunity to make these kinds of profits should be eliminated.

I have no especial affection for Goldman Sachs. The very first time I wrote a story involving Goldman was for a magazine called the Industry Standard, which chronicled the rise and fall of the dot-com boom. One Goldman associate I dealt with for that story ended our interview by noting that his company would buy advertising in the magazine in a transparent effort to sway the story (and a comically inept one, too—if you want to bribe a reporter, promising to buy ads ain't the way to do it). His boss later tried to get me fired.

Since that time, I've occasionally spoken to folks who work at Goldman, many of whom have had almost as many gripes about the place as the professional Goldman haters. One Goldmanite I've spoken with told me about how at the end of a particularly successful quarter his boss told his team that the trading results were great, but the next quarter they'd have to make an effort to make some money for Goldman's customers. Nobody spoke up to ask why the hell they weren't doing that all along.

Despite all this, it still seems to me that the now fashionable attack on Goldman Sachs is badly misguided. Goldman and JPMorgan are reaping the rewards of being the last ones standing in a game in which everyone else has been cowed or crushed. Yes, they're able to do that partly because the government has kept the financial system afloat. (Would anyone really prefer that it had not?) But the essence of the outcry now is that we have to find a way to punish Goldman for having been right. This is a mistake.

Goldman haters like to weave a narrative that connects the dots between Goldmanites and former Goldmanites who are supposed to rule the world in a one-degree-of-Goldman-Sachs fashion. The list expands until, as Taibbi himself says, it becomes a list of everything, like those lists of members of the Trilateral Commission and the members of the Council on Foreign Relations so beloved by an earlier generation of conspiracy theorists. The guilt-by-association parlor game is always a fun game to play and invariably yields terrific results—Matt Taibbi's Goldman Sachs investigation appears in Rolling Stone, the magazine that started the bogus vaccine-autism scare! The very same magazine responsible for dozens of young children needlessly dying of measles! The anti-Goldman lobby associates with child killers!