Well, ultimately, politics is not about the implementation of optimal economic policy, or fairness, but about power. While the struggle for power is often fram

Well, ultimately, politics is not about the implementation of optimal economic policy, or fairness, but about power. While the struggle for power is often framed as a good vs evil struggle, in practice it's more about the elite vs the rest of society. Good vs evil, with few exceptions (say, the Nazi regime, or ISIS), is mostly a discourse perpetrated by the elites to make the peons do their bidding. That's not to say all the elites do is bad, or that their existence at all is a negative; certainly there are benefits to hierarchy as well. Without that we'd still be hunter-gatherers or subsistence farmers. OTOH when elites get too much power it leads to oligarchism, stasis, and most people living a much lower level of quality of life than what the society could afford. A balance is needed. The historical way of re-balancing is to chop off the heads of the elites and start again. Back to the market economy, certainly the free market has increased the living standards of Western societies beyond the wildest dreams. But also the market tends to concentrate wealth, and ultimately economical power begets political power. Progressive taxation, inheritance taxes etc. are ways societies can choose to avoid the oligarchy/stasis of too much concentration of power. So no, Bob creating more wealth than Fred isn't necessarily unfair, but even so, both Bob and Fred would likely benefit from a more egalitarian society (Fred gets a better standard of living, and Bob gets to keep his head).