I'd say a large part of your evident confusion stems from the common mistake of confusing capitalism and free enterprise. Workers and capitalists operate within the free enterprise system, but play different roles. This is the classic market theory articulated by Adam Smith in his 1775 book "The Wealth of Nations" (maybe you've heard of it?). The system Smith describes is explicitly composed of two classes of people--or perhaps it's more accurate to say two groups of people playing distinct roles in the system: Workers and capitalists.

Or, in more colorful 18th century prose:

We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But...masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labor above their actual rate.

You're not on solid ideological ground to try to put an emotional spin on my description of the role of the worker in the system. I didn't say "bosses" and workers, I said capitalists and workers, and that's a horse of a different color. (And it was Smith who called them "masters" and "workmen".) The system wouldn't be called capitalism if it didn't contain capitalists, now would it?

A more subtle difficulty here is that you're assuming that I have a problem with classic free market theory. I don't, especially after reading "Wealth of Nations". It's just that I don't like today's economic system. I've got news for you, it isn't Smith's free market economy. With the concentration of vast power in corporations and their unhealthy ties to the government, what we have is edging over into oligopoly. I'd like to have free markets back, thank you very much.

One thing that might strike you reading "Wealth of Nations" is that the economic world Smith describes was actually more egalitarian than today. The 18th century economy was very fine-grained, composed mostly of small businesses and individuals. Smith estimated the ratio of wealth between the top and bottom classes at around 20-to-1. Contrast that with today's 432-to-1 ratio of CEO to worker pay. Smith's model incorporates that structure in tenets such as the assumption that decisions in a marketplace are made by a myriad of individuals on a roughly equal footing, the more the better. He also understood that a free market can be corrupted by collusion (lumps in the fine-grained soup of individual decision-making). Judging by the often disapproving way he described the large companies of his day (e.g. Hudson Bay Company), Smith may have considered large economic entities with their concentration of wealth and power to be a corrupting influence analogous to collusion. I'm pretty sure that if Smith came back today he'd look around and would not be pleased at what he saw.

So, next time you want to argue economics, you'll be able to argue with what I actually think, and not what you think I think.

(Huh...that utopian egalitarian free market I described sounds like eBay. What a pleasant thought.)