First, money at the top that is not circulating back down to the bottom through taxes or real investment, meaning providing seed money for entrepreneurs, means money is not moving. Money only works when it's moving, otherwise it has been removed from the economy and can't really be considered a part of it.
Second, wealth protects itself by buying governments and cutting taxes on itself. With people at the bottom being underpaid and unable to take up the slack, government is starved and public works like infrastructure repair don't get done. The rich don't care if roads and bridges are a mess, they now use helicopters to get to their private airports. Public works employ a lot of people at high wages, so when they dry up, more of the middle class does and government is starved again.
Third, with people who are willing to take risks, the middle class, largely disappearing down into the working class or below, the pool of people willing to risk everything by becoming entrepreneurs have nothing to risk, so they're stuck where they are.
Fourth, we now have a system in which wealth attracts wealth in a feedback loop, causing more and more to disappear from the economy as risk averse plutocrats turn to hedge funds that promise growth without risk instead of growth through risk.
Fifth, a bought government that fails to act to counteract any of this, not even by raising the minimum wage when the cost of living is going up sharply, destroys faith in itself. Once it becomes the servant of the rich and the master of everybody else, we can expect a revolution. Let's hope it's a peaceful one because violent ones generally don't work.
So it's not just jealousy of Bezos and the Waltons and the other billionaires out there. Most of us don't want the responsibility so much wealth should incur but which they all seem to shrug off easily. It's the fact that they are hurting all of us indirectly and many of us directly. Billionaires and democracy are utterly imcompatible and I'd rather destroy the billionaires than the democracy.
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