The rich have always governed human society, since the first cavemen organized themselves. Pretty much, there will always be rich people. They will always have proximity to the levers of power, as opposed to the middle class and working class. That's how human nature was set up; if you have a beef with it, take it up with evolution and how our psychology works. We're not a species conditioned for economic egalitarianism in governing our society.
What's missing from this analysis is a number of things. Wealth is being increasingly made, not from inheritances, but from reaping the rewards of investment in the new fields - technology, green energy, and the like. I should point out that the innovators in these areas are the sorts of rich people we should be encouraging, rather than plundering their manors and burning them at the stake. About only a fifth of wealthy families succeed in staying rich past 3-4 generations, anyway. The Rockefellers and the Carnegies are vastly more rare than you think. Arguably, the rich people we're seeing today are more the Gateses, the Jobs, and the like. They're not old money, they're new money taking advantage of the new economy.
The standard of living - well, everyone on this board is probably among the top 10% in living standards in this world, if not 5%. Really, that's one way to measure wealth, and the United States and Europe have it in spades. Perhaps members of this board should start looking to avoid the pitchforks themselves, rather than dreaming about administering the pitchforks to the bodies of others. I imagine the people of Africa, Asia, and other nations have the same violent fantasies against you people as some of you do about the United States' 1%.
This is not to dismiss income inequality as a problem although I might have more tolerance for it than some of you. This is to dismiss the idea that violent economic revolution solves anything, and that most of the Americans and Europeans on this board are anything but well off relative to the vast majority of the globe.
The notion of everyone being materially equal and the idea of us violently killing and restricting the rich to feed the poor usually ends in miserable disaster and failure for all involved. You can try it again; but the economic literature of such an attempt has usually shown that the "populists" become even worse than the formerly powerful "economic royalists," when handed political power.
This is only three examples but there were many more.
