My hot take is that wealth inequality is the least bad problem we could have, if it is even a problem at all.

What people are actually experiencing is not wealth inequality, but cost disease. Vital things (housing, healthcare, education) are more expensive - and that's mostly the fault of state action.

Two things:

1) You have to get it out of your head that it is enough when everyone has X standard of living. It isn't. It's enough when less than a critical threshold of the population is dissatisfied, and that dissatisfaction can come no matter what the median/lowest standard of living is. This is just how societies work, uniformly.

2) Money is a ledger supported by a social contract. Spending wealth in ways that erode the social contract is bad. I think we can all agree 500M dollar yachts, empty luxury apartment buildings, and buying up shorelines in populated areas are all bad looks, and therefore, erode the social contract. The wealthy really need to step in and police each other socially here, if they want to continue being wealthy.

But that state action is the direct result of wealth's influence over the state and how it operates

I'm not well-versed in "cost disease", but yes, standards go up. Cars have to have airbags and backup cameras and infernal electronic nannies. So an (alleged) increase in safety has been mandated, and the costs are obligatory. IOW, your risk of dying in a car goes down, but it doesn't come for free.

Medical care is getting better, insurance is required to pay for more and more things, but that drives up insurance costs.

In my county, fire sprinklers are required in all new houses.

Costs go up, but at least, in theory, you're getting something in return.

You're welcome to blame the state. Without those actions, things would be somewhat more affordable. But it seems pretty clear from the data on inequality that inequality is a much bigger factor in bidding up living costs than the fact that I need to install sprinklers in my house, even if sprinklers are a very large cost relative to my income.

> if it is even a problem at all.

One of the pillars of capitalism is that the entire economy is more efficient when decision making power is dispersed as close as possible to the people making economic decisions aka what they buy.

When we have ended up in a situation where a handful of people are making all the economic decisions because they have all the money, there is no functional difference between that situation and a command economy.

If you’re a believer in capitalism as a tool to eliminate scarcity you should view the existence of billionaires(adjust for inflation) over the longer term as policy failures that are eroding capitalisms ability to create more and more.

Politically wealth inequality is a problem as the wealthy have more means available to them to influence votes, candidates and appointments. So you have a society that's partly democratic but with a lot of unequal influence at the top.