The fallacy of your argument is that you equate "requires effort" with "the level of results scales with level of effort" If I have nothing, I have a couple of

The fallacy of your argument is that you equate "requires effort" with "the level of results scales with level of effort" If I have nothing, I have a couple of days to live - I need water, food, shelter. I cannot afford to be picky in the means of getting these. I find a manual labor task. It's hard, exhausting work, but I get paid and can buy water, food, and shelter. Through work and cleverness, I can improve my situation. And "improve" almost always means LESS work, LESS exhaustion, MORE security. If I have $10,000, I can have at least a few months of water, food, and shelter. I can be picky in how I obtain employment. I can afford to travel distances to find better opportunities (better = LESS work, LESS exhaustion, MORE security). Should something happen (illness, transportation troubles, etc) I can arrange to work around it. Just having that initial wealth creates an imbalance that is unrelated to my level of effort. If I have $5 million, I can live modestly off the interest. My "effort" is finding an investment that outstrips inflation enough to let me live off the remainder. This is effort, sure, but it is not 40+ hour work weeks. It is not holding down multiple jobs. It is not skipping paying for car insurance or car inspections or oil treatments because you need one more month to make the payments. Sure, there are millionaires spending 60+ hours/week trading and dealing. And they are successful. That's fine, but that's not the whole of existence. (it is also very selective - how many people work hard - that hard or harder - and aren't millionaires? That's not the model I want everyone striving towards. That's not success, that's just obsessive wealth.