For better or worse, the more closely you are involved in the market, the more it benefits you. I am not sure that this ought to be considered a dirty secret. The free market benefits you if you invest in it. Otherwise, unless you have some good or service that is in demand, it doesn’t. Oh, well.

It would be lovely if America could solve the problem of wage stagnation simply by increasing regulation of corrupt bankers and raising tariffs and trade restrictions to protect domestic jobs. I’m too old to think that’ll work.

Market abuses are disgraceful, and ought to bemoaned, obviously. But the reason to run away from the market is not because one perceives that it provides insufficient benefits. One changes course when one has identified a more attractive alternative.

What’s our more attractive alternative?

Also, I am confused as to why you connect corruption to stagnant domestic wages, unless the answer is simply “because I can.” This trend is in large part a function of globalization, which really doesn’t have that much to do with corruption, because, well, everybody cheats. It’s not an American invention and we absolutely have not cornered the market on it.

Here’s the thing. Many high-minded Americans have spent the last half-century or more lecturing us about the disgraceful gap between the standard of living in the industrialized world and elsewhere. Well, the gap is closing. Hooray? Notice that the gap can close because the poor get wealthier or because the wealthy get poorer. It’s a sad fact of economic and mathematical life that if you divide the same pie into more pieces, each person gets less in absolute terms. Only if you can grow the pie itself will each person get a greater share in absolute terms from a smaller fraction of the pie. That happens only if the economy as a whole grows larger. That doesn’t happen when taxes get higher, when tariffs are added, and trade is restricted due to international acrimony. Oh well.