Your friend is not entirely wrong, but he seems to miss, as many do, the role fiat plays in the outcomes we are seeing in the economy. He could use Jimmy Song’s new book
From a friend on FB where I shared this:
“This should prove to be an interesting debate between who would be responsible to stop the mathematical inequality that is doomed to arise in the economy. Here, you point the to government. And yes, they are the bad guy. BUT, when someone has to be the bad guy it needs to be the government. Just like when parents have to be the bad guy to set their children straight, and the children end up disliking the overbearing parents because of it. Someone does need to be the bad guy. Up until the 1800's it was the church and the church leveraged afterlife fear in order to garner subjugation of the masses. But now that the church has significantly less power, who is going to be the bad guy who had to do what must be done to set the math back to "fair". Check out the linked article, and I'll leave you with this quote from it.
"We find it noteworthy that the best-fitting model for empirical wealth distribution discovered so far is one that would be completely unstable without redistribution rather than one based on a supposed equilibrium of market forces. In fact, these mathematical models demonstrate that far from wealth trickling down to the poor, the natural inclination of wealth is to flow upward, so that the “natural” wealth distribution in a free-market economy is one of complete oligarchy. It is only redistribution that sets limits on inequality."
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-inevitable/“
Discussion
Agreed. Once I have some down time to think and write I’ll craft a response and share here. It’s the tools of control. The church abused written word and was the “government” of the time since they held the monopoly on violence.