You can have Rawlsian fairness, in which before you are born you structure society such that the expected goodness of your life is on average best. This leads t

You can have Rawlsian fairness, in which before you are born you structure society such that the expected goodness of your life is on average best. This leads to arguments about limiting a person's abilities to hold wealth in the vein you mention, and I think those arguments are good. However, since we aren't able to structure all of society (genetics yet, physics maybe never), Rawls has to wait. Even ignoring historic wealth, things like IQ, new ideas/discoveries, etc aren't distributed fairly. This is to say we need a system which can be fair given that the starting point (at our current level of technology) isn't fair. This is a lower level of fairness than Rawlsian. Think of it like a group of people asking what the rules of poker should be after the hands are dealt -- hard but perhaps possible. This is to say that having discarded the second part of Rawls' Theory of Social Justice, we still have the first part: "each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others" From this you get Aquinas' construction of free trade from natural moral law, followed by modern economics proofs for prices being the answer to an optimization problem over aggregate utility in the presence of scarce goods (you give the good you don't need to whomever can give you the most goods you do need. If everyone does this, society is the most well off it can be in aggregate). This seems to me fair in the sense of after-the-cards-are-dealt poker rules, if we could control the laws of physics and change our genetic code I do agree we could do better.