Eh, no.  Free Markets (truly free markets, not quasi free markets) facillitate the balance.  Not upset it.  It is when over regulation by an instrusive and clueless government diddles with the markets that the balance is thrown akilter and sad excesses occur.

You have a mistaken notion that a garbage man is worth as much as a CEO because he works as hard.  The truth is that those making the big bucks, dont necessarily work hard - they work smart.  And smart is not a commodity that can be taught in a trade school.

Interesting, you really do have a problem with people who know how to make money. What I will never understand is how does anyone expect to have great products at very cheap prices at the same time. Since you seem so concerned over those who can not afford the finer things in life because they can only do certain jobs that don't pay much, perhaps you should focus more on the unnecessary products that are made which are usually products these same people you care about so much can't really afford.

Better yet, why not educate those who can't afford this stuff to avoid gettingbthem in the first place. Does everyone truly need an iPhone? Does everyone truly need a xBox 360 or a Nintendo Wii? Does everyone truly need 2008 Ford Mustang or Chevy Corvette? Does everyone truly need Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts coffee for the house? Maybe most of these businesses would not be in business if these people that you care about so much would not waste (not spend, waste) their money on unnecessary items and products such as phones that can connect to the internet to be able to see youtube.com everywhere you go, or mp3 players that you can see the cd cover of the song you are listening too and scroll thru it by touching the screen, or fancy cars the waste twice as much gas as a economical Sedan just to look cool.

The real problem with this country is that some people have convinced themselves that they can not live without certain products and that these businesses (Apple, Dell, Mercedes Benz, Starbucks, Macy's, Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft) are the only options they have to survive in this world. Many decades ago TVs did not exist, many more decades before that cars did not exist, many centuries before electricity did not exist. How in the world did we (the human race) make it this far for so many centuries or milleniums without any of these things that somehow today it's not a want but a need?

The problem comes when CPS checks your house for living conditions of your kids, finds you don't have cable (or even a TV) and tries to take your kids.  Tell that family that TVs aren't a necessity.  Better yet, tell the CPS worker.  There are a whole bunch of things we can live without, but that are against the law to be without.  We could live with cardboard boxes for shelter, but it's against the building code.  Do we really need these big structures? 

I agree, but manufacturing these are necessary for the well-off and there's no way common sense will prevent the consumer from catching up with the Joneses; nonetheless, America is supposed to be the land of plenty and no turning back as Jythier suggests.. 

All cliches have a basis in reality.  Making a turism a cliche in all situations does not validate the situation, but at the same time it does not negate the truism.

Dare I say lipstick on a pig...

"share the wealth"

You're living in the country that invented 'The American Dream' and prides itself on freedom (including freedom from being punished for doing well). Laissez faire doesn't come into it, the whole point in America is you don't mess with people's earnings just because you haven't thought up a way to make that much money yourself.

Liberals and some (dare I say it) American socialists have a problem with realising America is not a centre-left country full of welfare grants which mean it's cheaper to sit at home than go to work (a la Europe).

If you really want Obama to lose.

Huh? How does increasing the total amount of money mean that there is exploitation of labour and/or government? In fact what do you even mean by exploiting governance+labour?

The government should exist to maintain laws, property rights, correct market imperfections etc., so yes wealth (/the markets) is dependant on government/the law, since you need such things for a market to either exist, or function best. However in the absence of imperfections (and assuming basic rule of law+property rights) the free market is the most efficient choic. That is, it will result in the greatest aggregate result for the economy. The problem with this? It doesn't always result in what is deemed a 'fair' result - you can have the rich earning most of the money, and the poor getting very little. Hence you then have the government imposing taxes to try and even incomes out. The problem with this? It hurts the free market, reducing efficiency. So what you actually have is a trade off between total income, and income harmonization (and from income you get wealth of course). You seem to have got this muddled up somehow since you talk of free markets hurting things at labour/governance's expense. To try and put it another way, think of the economy as a cake. Ideally you would want everyone to have an equal sized slice of that cake. However the closer you try to align the slices to be of equal size, the smaller the cake is, while the less you worry about that, the bigger the cake is. So if you increase the size of the cake, even though you're not focusing on making sure all the slices are equal, it is quite possible that you could have everyone better off with the largest cake than they would have been with more equal slices and a smaller cake. To give you a quick idea of why the cake is getting smaller as you increase redistribution, look at the extreme cases - e.g. the government decides to tax 90% of everyones income, and then redistribute the pool equally between people. So a brain surgeon who has spent say 8 years of training isn't earning much more than a rubbish collector. Meanwhile a businessman isn't going to be that interested in trying to discover some genius new invention that could benefit people lots, because they will hardly make any money from it, and it could require a ton of money (and massive risk of failing). The result? Those people are either less inclined to work/invent or don't at all, and the economy shrinks. The pure communism result meanwhile (perfectly equally distributed incomes) is impossible for a country.

The problem with fairness though is that it is subjective, and hence is often different from person to person. For example take teachers - they are performing a vital role in educating your children, so it's only fair they get a pay rise. Or the police, who are performing a vital and dangerous role, so it's only fair they get a pay rise, etc.; it's more efficient to simply set the price that results in the correct number of (suitably qualified) people being employed. The same goes for firemen, rubbish collectors, etc. etc.; ask one person what they should all be paid each, and it's almost certain to differ from someone else, and so on.

Exploitation on the other hand isn't a good thing, and I would agree that there is a role there for the government, since exploitation is basically the companies looking to get away with paying workers less than the market rate, or taking shortcuts in health+safety areas, etc.; However it's worth noting that if the companies are operating in a reasonably competitive environment (i.e. you don't just have one 'super-company' that employs everyone) then they will maximise their profit by paying the market rate. That is, if you try and pay people below the market rate, and there is reasonable information+mobility of labour, then people will go to all the other jobs paying the market rate first, and you'll be left with far fewer workers. That in turn means you produce/sell less, and your profits are hurt more. Similarly if all companies try and charge below the market wage together, that will increase the demand for labour (it may look attractive for companies to hire more workers since they're now cheaper), and decrease the supply (fewer people will want to work as long/hard since they're getting paid less). That means you now don't have enough workers for your needs, and so aren't maximising your profits, so you increase the wage you pay to attract more workers.

You argue convincingly but these days exploitation steadily takes place overseas and the demand for labor here is heading south with the exception of low service jobs.

China is south?