No, extreme inequality is inherently a bad thing, assuming there is no reasonable safety net provided primarily by the rich (a fairly good assumption if you're

No, extreme inequality is inherently a bad thing, assuming there is no reasonable safety net provided primarily by the rich (a fairly good assumption if you're talking about the US). It always leads to unrest. Wealth is power and power is wealth in capitalism; the wealthy exert their influence to increase their wealth and inequality, once established, always increases. It is never stable. Having a huge class of people begging and sleeping in the streets and another small class of people with extreme wealth is just begging for violence to occur. Then you get enormous private security firms, walled private communities with hired cops to keep the riff raff out and prevent theft/kidnapping for ransom. What happens when the unwashed masses decide to vote to take some of the wealth society has generated back? Or, more's to the point, what happens once they do this and realize their vote doesn't matter because the political power structure is rigged to only cater to the interests of the wealthy by, e.g., doing nothing but banning physical force, the kind of force that's exclusive to the poor? Mobility is a ridiculous red herring; who cares if a poor person here or there wins some sort of lottery and ascends to the elite class of super-rulers every so often, or an elite drops into brutal poverty and abuse? The more things change, the more they stay the same. Government regulations providing a safety net for the poorest and helping to protect the weak from the powerful is the only thing that makes inequality tenable for any amount of time. Minimum wage and taxes which go to pay for healthcare and infrastructure are the only thing keeping society civilized and livable for the poor. Without it, well, we'd see that violence is a very cheap solution that people turn to if they think they have very little to lose, or if they are hungry. And profits do not represent value at all, profit is simply the difference between how much something is worth and how much you can force/trick someone else into paying for it.