Free Market .com

What free market force prevents unearned wealth?

I understand how competition drives down prices. However, I've often wondered how the free market puts a value on everyone's labor. What happens when someone's labor is over valued or under valued? How can there be huge billionaires in the world? Surely, no one person's work can be worth that much. There has to be some kind of bad arrangement that screws other people out of their wealth. I'm not talking about how hard someone works. I'm talking about how the free market allows or disallows people to get paid the true value of their labor.

Public Comments

1. If you know how to play poker, this will be very easy for me to explain. If one person starts with more chips, they will make larger plays. Although they'll lose more, they'll also win more. This is because if they put as much money up as the other players - they are putting a smaller percentage of their cache in the pot. If the player with the most chips put an equal percentage of their cache in the pot, they will be bidding more chips than the other players. In either case, their losses will be statistically less and and their winnings will be commensurately more. Have you ever heard that you have to have a job to get a job or have a car to get a car? The same applies here. Once people get ahead, they often stay ahead, and each step they take to get further ahead gets easier.
2. I depends on what "earned" means. I think you think that earned income is income according to how hard you worked for it (yes/no?). But in fact the market doesn't proportion income according to this principle, instead it bases income on how marginally useful your services are. So for instance, why shouldn't the daylaborer be paid more than the businessman -after all the former does more work? The answer is that the day laborer usually builds stuff like ditches and roads. So say that you need a road built -you would value the first stretch of road highly because you need it to drive, the second stretch moderately so because you now have full capacity to go wherever you need, but the third stretch very low because you really don't need the road any longer. Whereas the businessman, as long as he provides something of high service (like computers) he is guaranteed a high income. It would seem, that as the businessman is always planning and innovating and bringing progressively better products to market -he recieves progressively higher income.