I understand where you are coming from 100%, but ultimately, money & wealth is the manner in which this socioeconomic system describes power imbalances between

I understand where you are coming from 100%, but ultimately, money & wealth is the manner in which this socioeconomic system describes power imbalances between people - power imbalances which are not natural and which are not indefinitely feasible. With $1B, I can hire 20,000 people for $50,000 a year. I possess the things they think are necessary for their livelihood (the much-vaunted 'means of production'), laundered through this thing we call an 'economy', and my ownership of those things is protected with force of law and custom. My $1B is heritable, and according to the doctrines of personal property, essentially inviolable. Is there a distinction between a billionaire and a dynastic prince of a small nation who can command up to 20,000 people for up to a year before they get angry enough at him that they stop listening? Large amounts of wealth inequality implicitly distort liberal democracy - the thing that recognizes "rights" as a philosophical system of morality & ethics - and destabilize it. There is no "correct" level of wealth inequality, but a system in which wealth inequality is growing in an out of control fashion, is an unstable system whose existence is threatened. That this system is liberal democratic market capitalism matters little - this is not some kind of natural arrangement, it's something we built, and it's something which can fail. Because people, as a whole, only respect what's written on little bits of paper - only respect the customs and law of property rights and the existing power structure - so long as the system provides them with the things they think are necessary for their livelihood. Well, that's our system. Nearly all growth of the economy is ending up technically "owned" by a narrower and narrower minority. For one reason or other, the economic equation has developed an unbalanced variable, and wealth is completely failing to trickle down... and our system can't sustain this perpetual exponential growth in power imbalance forever. Some of the greatest attacks on inequality were performed in part due to a very real fear that the whole system would collapse in a socialist revolution; The fact that the Communists are fallen has made this less credible, and perhaps, for all their evils, that's not a great thing for us. Apparently, in the early history of currency, after we had gotten property rights laid down tightly and developed a fungible system of value, various civilizations developed a problem. Unlike the vague bonds of social obligation that they had previously represented, debts that are denominated in coinage attract contract arrangements with penalties such as slavery. This was accepted until surprisingly recently as an unfortunate necessity of life. The elite discovered that the accumulation of slaves was a practical problem, because their customary service as cook or manservant or sexual partner took them out of the fields, and first currency crises were born: It was recognized that if the fields were left fallow, this was a worse outcome for all than the property of the elites not being sacrosanct. The arrangement that was periodically arrived at was that the king would issue a jubilee, freeing all the slaves to go back to their fields and their families, with no compensation to the elites. When this was missing for a protracted period, slave revolts tended to pop up, with summary execution of the masters as a prize. The system of norms ("rights") is subordinate, at some level, to the proper functioning of a society. It doesn't particularly matter whether we call people with an indispensable debt that they need to perform service to partially mitigate, "slaves" or "working class" or "debt peons". You can only push them so far and still earn positive economic returns, and beyond that, in the full view of history, you can only push them so far and still keep your head. Whether one is "entitled" to property is a view from so close to the ground one can't see past the blades of grass.