The trouble is that there is no secret pool of wealth that can somehow give people the living standards they expect if only it were prised from the hands of the

The trouble is that there is no secret pool of wealth that can somehow give people the living standards they expect if only it were prised from the hands of the super-wealthy, and populist politicians and activists have been taking advantage of people's lack of understanding and desire to blame someone to lie about this. Everything that ordinary people need requires scarce real resources like land, raw materials, equipment, workers' time, etc. The super-wealthy do not use such a disproportionate amount of those that redistribution would help the rest of the populace. Which is why demagogues like to compare ordinary wages to their wealth instead - but although they're measured in the same dollars, one is measuring real stuff ordinary people buy and the other the shareholdings in companies times the last price shares traded and there's no way to transmute the latter into the former. Sure, many of those companies produce real things, but the general populace is already receiving those things, generally with very efficient pricing and use of limited resouces so there's no magical savings there either.