[antisthenes]

> I think there's a good argument that financial markets are a big reason that people can ever retire.

There isn't. The reason people can finally retire in the 20th and 21st centuries is due to extreme exploitation of fossil fuels and using multiples of stored energy to make goods, which would normally be unavailable compared to the energy budget coming from the Sun in a given year.

You can argue in some way that the financial markets made this wealth easily accessible to the average joe through a 401k, but it could have been just as easily allocated using a different not-for-profit mechanism.