Excellent, this is an interesting debate that goes back hundreds of years. Many people would say that inflation is a market phenomenon too. Do you realise that any economy which permits charging interest on a loan *requires* inflation? The rich entity charging interest gets *all* their capital back, *plus* the interest. If no extra money is being injected into the economy (i.e. no inflation), eventually the interest charger collects all the money in circulation and the currency fails.
Let us consider this situation. Every unit of "currency" held out of circulation equates to "demand" for that currency relative to other goods and services. Thus as this rich person collected more and more of the currency the goods and services in the economy would fall in price until supply of money "on the market" matches the supply of goods "on the market".
Thus, if the rich man never spent a single dime of the interest he earned then over time his savings would contribute to general deflation and the "real" interest rate that he would be charging would go through the roof as effectively every dollar of interest collected is "sequestered" and thus is identical to monetary deflation. Eventually he wouldn't be able to lend any money because the deflation rate caused by his "hoarding of interest" would make it more profitable for people to *save* before producing instead of borrowing to produce. If the rich man ever tried to "spend" all of this wealth all at once he would find that prices would jump dramatically back to where they were before he collected and sequestered all of that interest.
The result is that no one gets "something for nothing". The rich man could only lend out money at interest rates higher than the average productivity of society and thus he could only fund "risky" "high potential" projects and the result of the project will be either to A) make the person who borrowed the money much better of (along with everyone else) or B) face default as the borrower's business plan fails.
The result is that the system is self-regulating. Any attempt to corner the market is not productive and lending at interest does not cause an economy to implode unless the money lent was conjured into existence from nothing.
