What makes MLM schemes bad is not that the people at the top make money faster, but that people who aren't on the top tend to not make any money at all. This is

What makes MLM schemes bad is not that the people at the top make money faster, but that people who aren't on the top tend to not make any money at all. This is a direct result of the fact that many MLM schemes are actually pyramid recruiting schemes, where you profit primarily by recruiting people beneath you. If everyone is doing this, then recruiting grows exponentially, and it doesn't require many levels before you run out of people to recruit, which prevents anyone below the top levels from making significant money. Obviously capitalism doesn't have that problem, since it's driven by the sale of goods and services, not by one-time recruiting commissions that we'll some day exhaust. TL;DR — Your analogy doesn't hold, as the market is not a fixed pie zero-sum game.