You mean enticing people to invest that otherwise would not / who are just putting it in savings?

Aside from that, yeah, I don't disagree that index funds are good in many respects.

Within context of this discussion, they would be performing better for individuals and the pensions and so on without all the legal and illegal lobbied-for loopholes that result in skimming and manipulation. It could be effectively argued through the links here and a few others (and, for example, a book titled Naked, Short, and Greedy that lays a lot of this or very clearly, in both data and abstractly) that the middle and lower classes have been... robbed... of billions and billions and billions (and billions) of dollars over the past decade alone.