Biases Against the Creation of Wealth

Leaving those things aside, today active government policy promotes borrowing vs saving (through Federal Reserve credit policy), and actively bails out Wall Street speculators - who made a mint during credit bubbles.

Common people aren't stupid if they feel at times "the system is stacked against me". It often is stacked against them. I am no socialist, but libertarians recognize that the fastest way to push people into socialism is to institutionalize unfairness this way.

> But economists who debate certain issues about the perfection of markets are not debating, say, whether prices give incentives. Almost all economists recognize the core benefits of the market mechanism; they disagree only at the margin.

Sometimes, though, you wonder how marginal the 'margins' are. For instance, information asymmetry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry). In a modern, advanced economy with complex products and services, who can really judge a product just by picking it up and looking at it? Even something so simple as the food we eat might be grown with toxic weedkillers, and we can't tell that just by picking it up and looking at it.

Not that I'm actually anti-market or free trade... far from it. I just like to push back, at times, it's healthy to question things.

But it seems like in the past 20 years, prices have stayed the same or gone up, employee salaries have stayed the same or gone down, but executive pay packages have sky rocketed. Does this mean that all the innovation and "wealth" created by enterprise software is just making the rich more money?

For instance, my own opinion is that it is good that you can get rich by creating things that others need. On the other hand we know that inequality of income creates inequality of opportunity in the next generation. Which means that not everyone has the same opportunity to get rich by creating something that others need.

The article currently refers to "a society's wealth" but not the distribution thereof. The American economy has grown significantly since 2000, for example, but the median wage has not. Is there any point to a growing economy when the median citizen is not benefiting from it?

There is a brief mention of the irrationality of voters who do not trust increasing market forces as a means of solving health care problems. However, one can argue that we have a more market based health care system than the systems of Western Europe, for example, but worse health outcomes. How can we be sure, then, that increasing market forces even more will improve the situation?