It's not that there shouldn't be rich people, the question is how many and by how much. Obviously on some level we have finite resources.
Maybe it's crazy, but I had this idea that perhaps some reasonable limit could be determined mathematically, say, the income of a given top ratio should not exceed the income of the same bottom ratio by the square root of said ratio (e.g. the top 10% should not make more than 3.16 times more than the bottom 10%).
Fiat money is just a concept made up by governments, so no – the resource is not finite, and I think that's the crucial point in lots of these conversations. Innovators create and deliver value to large populations of people and are rewarded for it economically – this is supposed to be fair, and arguably is "the american dream" because the premise is that they are being "fairly" compensated for the overall value they've delivered to society at large.
The closer you get to individual transactions as examples, the easier it is to ignore that it's not a zero-sum game. I think we all agree we're probably paying too much for an individual iPhone X or whatever, but few disagree that the creators of these devices deserve at least the amount of wealth that their creations "gave back" to society through value, convenience, efficiency, and so forth on a society-level scale.
Maybe it's crazy, but I had this idea that perhaps some reasonable limit could be determined mathematically, say, the income of a given top ratio should not exceed the income of the same bottom ratio by the square root of said ratio (e.g. the top 10% should not make more than 3.16 times more than the bottom 10%).