Calling it skill is one option, but is a very ideologically colored one. Ideally, yes skill and hard work would lead to money as a reward and as a way to promot

Calling it skill is one option, but is a very ideologically colored one. Ideally, yes skill and hard work would lead to money as a reward and as a way to promote the most skilled to powerful positions so they can use those skills to improve the common good. 1) In my opinion, on an everyday scale of richness, the most important causal factor is family background, including inheritance. Would you support abolishing all forms of inheritance? Then skill could develop on an even, level playing field. For some reason the same people who say the rich are rich because they are skilled and work hard, are the same people who really want to keep the system of inheritance intact. 2) On the billionaire level of richness it is mostly luck, out of a strictly limited pool of potential candidates.