Does the Free Market Allocate Rewards Based on Desert?Mike Rappaport

As compared to real world alternatives, Bryan Caplan says yes:

My guess is that my fellow libertarians were reluctant to defend the market on grounds of desert precisely because they’re aware of . . .  counter-examples [such as rich incompetents and poor people of talent].  What I think they’re missing, however, is that by the metric of desert, the free market does relatively well. What other political-economic system does a better job of rewarding talented, hard-working people?

It is also worth pointing out that from the standpoint of desert, some of the largest interventions in the market are a moral disaster. The main function of progressive income taxation is to narrow the gap between talented, hard-working people and not-so-talented, not-so-hard-working people. But this pales before the greatest of all government crimes against desert: Immigration laws. Their whole function, of course, is to make sure that a foreigners earn drastically less than equally deserving Americans. The free market is not a perfect arbiter of desert, but under laissez-faire there is no way that unskilled Americans would earn twenty times more than equivalent labor in India.