In order to accomplish both of those things from different ends of the scale, certain rules have to be introduced which run directly contrary to a free market. I learned that the much-vaunted perfect market is in fact not very good for people's welfare. Living intimately with rural peasant Indians, I saw how anthropology systematically ignores their desperate poverty and the absence of benefits their state could provide. Mexico, with a large wealthy economy, offered many social benefits but they were not extended to people who live in villages. The experience convinced me that the phenomenon of poverty is as appropriate for anthropologists to study, as, for example, certain esoteric questions of kinship or governments in acephalous societies where there are no supreme rulers.
Poverty is certainly a regular social institution.
People are poor not because systems don't work, but because they do work. Even if you disagree with that, it is systematic enough to merit study. It's ironic that anthropologists will live next to desperately poor people in order to study them but ignore studying their poverty. There are societies where the difference between the richest and the poorest is so small that no one perceives that they are poor. I'm talking about very simple societies, like hunters and gatherers whose populations are dwindling very fast.