"When two people trade, both win. No one buys a bar a soap unless the money they’re spending for the soap is worth less to them than the soap itself."<p>Huge fail. People simply aren't rational actors. What about the case where an actor buys what he wants to buy, but that's not what he needs? You may want cigarettes and lottery tickets, but to say that you benefit from buying them, because otherwise you wouldn't buy them is stupidity.<p>To clarify, I'm distinguishing the transient benefit of "yay, I got what I wanted" from a productivity-enhancing benefit.
Free-market liberalism has been the dominant ideology for almost 200 years. If it hasn't solved poverty yet, there must be something wrong with the argument that it will inevitably solve poverty.