Categorical Aperitif

I just love how Dean Baker wraps up his critique of Steven Pearlstein's odious mythologizing of "the marketplace" and how it supposedly justifies the growing disparity between the wages of those who, you know, work and those who push abstractions around in cyberspace:

In short, the inequality that Pearlstein notes has nothing to do with the dictates of a market economy. It is the result of the people at the top rigging the rules to their benefit. They got the government to stack the deck in their favor and then hired people like Pearlstein to tell everyone that it was just the natural workings of the market.

It's hard to believe that an economics columnist could just miss things like government bailouts, corporate governance rules that actually insulate CEO salaries from "the market," trade policies that favor the owning classes while disempowering workers, etc., so...maybe he's just a ho?