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… is from page 175 of Tom Palmer’s February 2007 paper “Twenty Myths about Markets [2],” as this paper is reprinted in Tom’s excellent 2009 book, Realizing Freedom [3]:
Free markets tend to be characterized by a “circulation of elites,” with no one guaranteed a place or kept from entering by accident of birth. The phrase “the rich get richer and the poor gets poorer” applies, not to free markets, but to mercantilism and political cronyism, that is, to systems in which proximity to power determines wealth. Under markets, the more common experience is that the rich do well (but may not stay “rich” by the standards of their society) and the poor get a lot richer, with many moving into the middle and upper classes. At any given moment, by definition 20% of the population will be in the lowest quintile of income and 20% will be in the highest quintile. But it does not follow either that those quintiles will measure the same amount of income (as incomes of all income groups rise in expanding economies) or that the income categories will be filled by the same people. The categories are rather like rooms in a hotel or seats on a bus; they are filled by someone, but not always by the same people. When income distributions in market-oriented societies are studied over time, a great deal of income mobility is revealed, with remarkable numbers of people moving up and down in the income distributions. What is most important, however, is that prosperous market economies see all incomes rise, from the lowest to the highest.
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