People being poor is obviously a flaw. You could argue that it's a flaw that would exist in any other system as well and perhaps even be worse or that it's a flaw that's in some way balanced out by benefits that necessitate it as a side-effect, but saying that it's not a flaw at all makes you sound like you care more about their markets as their own abstracted entities than about the actual people who have to live in and use them. Which is a horrible, disgusting way to think.
In fairness, there's a legitimate philosophical position that would make poor members of society a feature instead of a flaw. If one holds that an underclass serves the purpose of motivating people to achieve more and thereby either escape from or avoid entering that underclass, then having some poor people in a society becomes a necessity to the economic system.
This is all well and good, but what "poor" means can be drastically different in different societies and ending up in a society like Victorian Britain where ending up maimed on the job and then starving because you have no natural means of support (which is more or less the natural endpoint of an unregulated market with a labor glut...there's more where that came from!) is naturally morally reprehensible. Every society has winners and losers, of course, but there's a point at which you need to step in to prevent the economic system from literally murdering the losers.
Without regulations like, say, the Americans With Disabilities Act, who would go through the effort of setting up ramps that would enable a wheelchair-bound person to even hold gainful employment, when that boss could hire an able-bodied person and save on the ramp? The society that the blue avatars in this thread envision isn't the fair "people are allowed to fail/be poor/whatever" society they envision, its one where one disadvantage (say, amputee status) reinforces others and culminates in leaving someone totally unemployable and therefore doomed to starvation.
Poll
