An interesting thing to consider is that even if you believe that the "rich" people deserve to have all of the assets, and consequently all of the risk, when so

An interesting thing to consider is that even if you believe that the "rich" people deserve to have all of the assets, and consequently all of the risk, when something does happen they conveniently do not take the disproportionate amount of suffering that would be implied by their disproportionate amount of resources. You can see this all of the time: - CEOs get huge bonuses when the company is succeeding, but when the company fails there are layoffs. In the worst case they often leave with a large amount of severance compensation. In short I think the problem is a lack of alignment (in addition to many others). The other problem is that our "democracy" is highly crippled. I might even conjecture that in a functional democracy large inequality should be impossible as the large poor population would always take actions to restabilize things. ---- To elaborate on this last point. People in this thread are commenting on all of the "loop-holes". Those loopholes don't really matter. In a functional democracy the poor would simply find all of them and vote to have them removed. I don't think "the poor" care about others having more wealth than them any more than they care that some are taller than them. The issue is that the current level of inequality is, dare I say it, unnatural. Take any human property you want -- height, weight, intelligence, mile time, anything objective. You'll see that the distribution in ability for that property (or properties) is no where even close to the wealth distribution. So, maybe the natural wealth distribution should be closer to the distribution of those "natural" properties.