That's pretty much the argument Anthony McCarthy makes at Echidne of the Snakes.
According to McCarthy, the problem is that rich people just don't get punished harshly enough for legal behavior.
It’s rather remarkable how successful the cover up of the crimes of the rich has been, considering that everyone knows it. In polite society the agreement is that it is one of those things that isn’t mentioned. Part of the cover up is achieved by our vaunted government of laws simply making many of the favorite methods of theft invented on behalf of the wealthy un-illegal. If someone can explain to me how most of the forms of “new financial instruments” are different from the kinds of things that con men on the sidewalk can get jailed for, it would be most interesting. That is the form, the major distinction between sidewalk shell game hustlers and blue chip hustlers is that the swells are the world class swindlers. Theft by the rich is and just about always has been legal. None of this is news, though. Not because it couldn’t be but because in just about every case nowadays among most of the English Speaking Peoples the “news” in on the scam.
It's the typical "rich people don't get punished like poor people" argument. Unfortunately, McCarthy doesn't explain how making various financial instruments illegal makes life easier for poor people. No, like a lot of leftists at Echidne's site, Anthony just blathers on about the unfairness of drug prosecutions between the rich and poor, or how rich people can afford better lawyers. In other words, he whines, he cries, but he sheds little light into how he thinks these situations can or should be improved.
For example, he quotes this article, then quickly glosses over the point. The argument made in the article is that poverty persists because the numerous manifestations of poverty (malnutrition, inadequate housing, lack of education, high crime rates, etc.) discourage any attempts to change. In and of itself, this is an interesting argument, but Anthony doesn't even touch it. Instead, he focuses on this quote:
In the community of people dedicated to analyzing poverty, one of the sharpest debates is over why some poor people act in ways that ensure their continued indigence. Compared with the middle class or the wealthy, the poor are disproportionately likely to drop out of school, to have children while in their teens, to abuse drugs, to commit crimes, to not save when extra money comes their way, to not work.
To an economist, this is irrational behavior. It might make sense for a wealthy person to quit his job, or to eschew education or develop a costly drug habit. But a poor person, having little money, would seem to have the strongest incentive to subscribe to the Puritan work ethic, since each dollar earned would be worth more to him than to someone higher on the income scale.
Anthony then bemoans the fact that rich people have more money and better resources to support drug habits. But drug use is only one of the issues of poverty. The biggest predictors of poverty are education, sexual behavior, and work habits. People who do not finish high school, have children before marriage, and who change jobs frequently (or don't have jobs) are much more likely to be poor than people who finish high school, delay having children, and stay at a job more than six months. I suppose it's much more satisfying for liberals like Anthony to complain about "the rich" than to actually try to figure out how to end poverty.