This sentiment comes up a lot as a protest against power laws; but they are perfectly normal, in that they're natural. In any situation where there are differen

This sentiment comes up a lot as a protest against power laws; but they are perfectly normal, in that they're natural. In any situation where there are differences among individuals and a single axis store of value (currency) there is going to be power law. Imagine a world where everyone started with an equal amount of money, and people only paid each other to see them do X. X could be singing, playing basketball, make youtube videos, standup comedy, croquet, whatever. With the passage of time, money will concentrate in a fractal representation of the 80-20 power law. 80% of the money will go to the top 20% of the people best at X, and even in that 20%, 80% of that money will belong to the top 20% of the top 20% and so on. If X was basketball, Michael Jordan would be a thousand times richer than me (he is) and a million or billion times richer than the poorest people (he is). Same for the best artists, most widely read authors, everything. If the currency is power / reproductive rights, the top 20% would pass their genes on to 80% of the children, again fractally. This is also borne out in nature, we're all children of Genghis Khan or King David or Abraham or whoever your geography's alpha was. What we can say, is that the situation is not rational, just, or merciful. All beneficiaries of the power law ride on the value provided by everyone else that cannot be quantified properly into the single-axis measure of value. Bezos could only build Amazon because there were already a country that was fought and paid for, roads, courts, electricity, planes and trains that society as a whole built for before he was born. That attribution is not being captured in any way, and we try to re-balance that value owed with taxes, which are again imperfect because we have only a single-axis value store. So normal and natural, yes, but the value is not distributed correctly. That's a rational and ethical problem, both of which are very artificial human constructs.