Your statement here lacks nuance at least as much as Joel's did. Adam Smith's invisible hand only goes so far. "Corporate greed" is a good thing to a certain extent - companies working hard to produce wealth are a good thing on the whole, although there are still environmental and social factors to be taken into consideration there. However, "corporate greed" among large companies often means liberal amounts of rent-seeking as well, whether through lobbying, creative accounting, fraud or other methods, and you won't find many economists who have anything positive to say about rent-seeking.

You dare to write this and then complain about strawmen? Wow. You do hopefully realize that not everybody has the same abilities, and that most people who start a job right out of high school don't do that because they "refuse to take chances", but because they don't have what it takes to get high-paying jobs after a college career. And certainly, it's not just money that will get you there - doing it without much in the way of money is possible, if you've got other assets, like an above-average intelligence and/or a supportive environment. But your implication in this paragraph that anyone can be a doctor or lawyer and that those who don't manage that are just lazy or don't dare to take chances, that is ridiculous and frankly rather offensive.

You must not have been paying much attention to all the economic reports pointing at the stagnation in wealth for the American middle class for not the past two, but the past ten years, with little improvement in sight for the near future. And certain groups of Americans have been disadvantaged for far longer than that.







Well, I don't disagree with you here - like I said, I don't endorse Joel's rosy views of socialism, which are seriously lacking nuance and ignoring the woes that Europe has as well (of course, Norway doesn't as much as other places, but then oil money will do that for you). And for sure, France is one of the worst offenders, because it's one of the most socialistic countries, and has a far too interventionist government.