Explaining reality is not a moral statement.
Ignoring reality, or worse rationalizing it, is immoral.
Happily, thru the arc of humanity history, numerous societies have chosen to mitigate the unfairness. Some proven strategies are expanding the franchise (enfranchisement), redistributing windfall profits, debt jubilees, jobs programs, social safety nets.
I'm noticing a distinct increase in ideologically motivated comments and a corresponding decrease in honest discourse. But then, why should HN be immune from it, it is fed by the same institutions as mainstream society.
And it's easy to see this rich-get-richer phenomenon in action. Look at European football (soccer). There, once a team gets wealthy, it can buy the best players and continue to stay on top. That's the winner-take-all phenomenon right there.
Sports in the US have addressed this winner-take-all problem with socialism. Baseball, American football, hockey, and basketball have drafts, where the best new players get distributed to the worst teams. Such non-market, socialistic practices work to the benefit of the league because they put all teams on a more even playing field. (Restrictions on the free agent market, the football scheduling difficulty increase with winning, arbitration, and max contracts are all also forms of socialism that act to restrain the free market for players).
These are not bad examples of how completely free markets lead to unfair winners' advantages, and inequality. They also provide good examples of the kind of market regulations and protections that can level the playing field (no pun intended.)
Baseball could, theoretically, also be efficient by allowing entrepreneurs to start a new team with new Moneyball-like principles or even deeper pockets. But to buy or start a new team, you need your competition (the other teams) to agree with your plan. That's not an open market even slightly.
True natural monopolies are exceedingly rare and usually short-lived — most monopolies created by government[0]. What we observe with startups and venture capital is no exception: the Fed's continuous monetary expansion policy has driven more money into more volatile investments as investors try to achieve 'escape velocity' on their returns, and success has a natural compounding effect.
disclosure: not a socialist. Don't care for socialism at all. But it's not fair to tar socialism with billionaires feathering their nests driving down the relative return to labour vs capital, imho. It's just regulatory capture by its textbook definition. Total and complete regulatory capture, in fact.
It's not about the economic environment of billionaires and how they leverage their cash hordes to underpay their employees. The regulations mentioned would apply no matter how the pay range for talent was scaled relative to the owners.
We can talk about the economics of something without shitting on socialism or shitting on capitalism or having disclaimers about which system the speaker does or doesn't like best.
A better way of levelling the playing field would be league appropriation of all revenue above $x on a sliding scale for redistribution to poorer teams, yet have the players able to play where they want with no restraint on the market for their salaries.
What you'd get there is owners making dramatically less profit and players making vastly higher salaries. So why not that model? It's un-american! There are other models you can use if you want equality between teams. If you think it has anything to do with factors other than the owners want the money in their pocket and have the power to get it where the players presently don't I can't really help you resolve that. I do note that it is difficult to think of things in a fresh way when you've grown up with them constantly being in the background with an oft-repeated justification. Hard for all of us. I didn't grow up with american accented sports so I guess that's easier for me?
The owners would all scream, shriek and wale if anything like the restraints on the players was placed on literally any of their business interests. Imagine if for the good of all of america's industry the market for senior executives was subject to the same restraint of trade to level the playing field between mining, steel, tech, banking, retail, building materials, etc etc. So that all of America's industry can be strong and compete. No exec getting paid a million a year could complain, surely. Sportsmen can't because they're rich, right?
What does it mean to be ignorant of reality?