WHEN FREE MARKETS CREATE wealth, regardless of how wealthy one individual becomes, someone else, as noted above, is also better off.1 In a market in which new technologies are emerging at unprecedented rates, we would expect that those on the frontier of those technologies would experience extraordinary incomes.

TRY TELLING A PROSPECTIVE lottery player, “If you win, you must share your winnings with everyone equally, including those who didn’t buy tickets.” Would the person buy a ticket? Obviously not.

WHETHER OR NOT YOU’RE a millionaire, virtually all of your dollars are redistributed to others from the very moment they are earned. That redistribution of your money, when voluntary, can take a path of spending, lending (investing), or giving. The portion of the money that you choose not to spend will take the paths of redistribution based on someone else’s choices.

“IT IS NOT FAIR that companies can terminate their workers to increase profits” was one of the statements made at the dinner party that evening. Why employ someone in the first place? Does an employer hire to see someone work and earn a living or to reduce national unemployment figures? Of course not! Entrepreneurs create companies in pursuit of their own self-interests. And when they create these companies, they do not do so in a vacuum.

JOBS THEMSELVES DO NOT necessarily create prosperity; prosperity is created by the production of goods and services that people value. Make-work jobs that do not generate goods or services valued by others will not generate prosperity.

TODAY, SELF-SUFFICIENCY, FOR the most part, has been replaced by the division of labor. With self-sufficiency, one’s consumption is limited to only that which one produces. As such, consumption is limited primarily to the essentials for survival—namely food and shelter. It is quite obvious that, in self-sufficiency, one’s prosperity is simply the sum of personal production.

MANY PEOPLE BELIEVE THAT there is a finite number of jobs in the world, and that when one person gets one of these jobs, another must lose one. If this idea were true, our country’s labor force would still be the size it was when the Pilgrims landed.

SOME BELIEVE THERE IS a static quantity of resources in the world and that whatever one person consumes leaves that much less for someone else. It is true that at any given time there is a finite supply of available resources; however, as supplies are consumed, they are replenished or replaced with substitutes.

ONE’S GOODS CAN BE transferred to another person voluntarily, as in trade, or involuntarily, as in theft. In a voluntary transfer of goods, both parties gain because each party values the goods received more than the goods relinquished. However, more essential than the value gained in a trade is the prerequisite that each party must have produced something of value in order to carry out the trade.

THE PROPOSITION THAT EXECUTIVES earn far too much (as was stated that evening at my dinner) reflects a fundamental philosophical view that people should not be allowed to determine the conditions of their own personal relationships. Although this proposition was aimed at prohibiting certain arrangements between associates relative to their working relationship, it is, in principle, no different from prohibiting certain arrangements between partners relative to their sexual relationship.