>Minecraft players are playing a game to gather resources to build things. Alice is playing a economic simulation. Obviously she is going to win.

What is missing is that people were still able to play minecraft without the market, even on the given server. Did like the price? Then go mine your own, with the same chance of getting it as you would in the vanilla version.

The only person who did anything bad (which I think may still be arguable, but lets just say the only one who did anything bannable) was the one duping the items.

If anything, the tax they implemented in the 1.7 server was worse than the market takeover of the 1.6 server because it wasn't something a person could opt out of and forced an effective black market.