This is far too celebratory of markets. Markets pay for things that people of means want. If I make a useless toy that delights a rich person I am paid lavishly. If I make a useless toy that delights a poor person I get next to nothing.
> Markets pay for things that people of means want.
No, markets pay for things that are worth more than it costs to make them. Only a very small fraction of those things are useless toys that delight rich people.
This is a bit of hyperbole; desire and need are direct contributors to "worth" because you can extract more profit for it.
That being said, profit is a notoriously crude way of measuring utility, given that a lot of tragedy-of-the-commons type problems don't have "profitable" solutions without some type of government intervention. (See: pollution, public education and health, childcare, working week limits, etc.)
> profit is a notoriously crude way of measuring utility
There are no non-crude ways of measuring utility among different people with different, often incompatible, preferences.
> a lot of tragedy-of-the-commons type problems don't have "profitable" solutions without some type of government intervention.
They also don't have good solutions with government intervention, because the downsides of government intervention (regulatory capture, increasing power of the state, micromanagement of all aspects of people's lives, political power being used to benefit some instead of all) more than outweigh any increased benefit in a particular area.
> Markets pay for things that people of means will pay for more than it takes to create them.
Markets pay for things that people, period, will pay for more than it takes to create them. There's no restriction to "people of means". But yes, the word "worth" can be misleading if it's not understood to imply having something to trade (almost always money in today's economy) that the seller will accept in exchange.
The viewpoint, IIUIC, is that rich people and poor people will exist regardless of whether markets exist. There's pretty ample empirical evidence that this is true: rich people and poor people existed under feudalism, rich people and poor people existed under fascism, and rich people and poor people existed (de facto if not de jure) under communism.
What markets provide is an information-carrying mechanism to determine how you should allocate your efforts to get some of that wealth. If you're poor and want to be rich in a market economy, make a useless toy that delights a rich person. If you're poor and want to be rich in a communist economy, suck up to the party bosses. If you're poor and want to be rich in a feudal economy, you're fucked, because that useless toy that delights a rich person is his by divine right.
While all of these systems still have rich people and poor people, I would argue that the former leads to much more socially desirable outcomes than either of the latter, because at least the rules of the game for how to become rich are stable and well-known and the side-effects of the wealth-acquisition process are beneficial to humanity (or at least to that one rich person, but that's better than them being outright negative-sum, like when the way to get rich was by conquest).
If you’re poor and want to be rich in a feudal economy, get titled by participating in a war, seize property in a war, buy a minor peerage, marry a child into a peered family, become a merchant. This is all date- and location-dependent, of course.
This argument rests on the idea that inequality is equal across systems and that no system attempts to set a floor on how far you can fall or a ceiling on how far you can rise.
Are you talking about relative (ordinal) inequality, i.e. who is above whom" on the social strata? Or absolute (cardinal) inequality, i.e. how much more* do people above you have compared to you?
I would argue that the former is self-evidently equal across systems. By definition, if you're speaking in relative terms, for you to rise up the social strata someone else must fall.
I would not argue that this is true in absolute terms - measured in your country's currency, it seems empirically true that certain systems (in particular free-market corporate capitalism) lead to much wider disparities in wealth than others (say, communism). However, I'd argue that if you actually care about absolute wealth rather than relative wealth, this shouldn't matter to you, because the median person in corporate capitalism does far better than even the wealthy in communist countries (we discovered this in the early 90s).
There may be hybridized systems that can still generate adequate absolute wealth while capping relative disparities. I'm skeptical of many of the examples that are often cited, though. IMHO unionized capitalism actively failed during the 70s; people like to blame Reagan or Wall Street for the dismantling of unions & pension plans, but the competitive reality is that the companies that made up this system all went bankrupt because of foreign competition, not because of any particular policies. That's a failure to generate adequate absolute wealth; you can't ignore the existence of outsiders who follow a different system when judging the sustainability of your own system. European-style socialism is intriguing to me, but may suffer from a similar problem: it's unclear to me whether the EU can a.) hold together and b.) avoid getting conquered militarily by outside powers in the absence of the NATO security umbrella.
I didn't "celebrate" them at all, I just said that in a market system a purchaser of labor pays more when they determine some skill is worth more to them than another skill.
