Relative wealth is zero-sum, and relative wealth disparity can and does negatively affect you.
Let's stay your wealth/income remains static, but most people around you see a great increase in their own wealth/income. You are certainly less better off now because all this extra wealth in your area will increase demand for goods and thus prices. See Bay Area housing market for an example.
Take a very abstract product... something we assume to be unlimited in nature and examine it.... let's say a poem. A poet produces poems and sells a book of poems. We assume that the poet has created wealth out of thin air and that wealth is therefore not a zero sum game.
But in order to produce the poem, the poet needs energy. Energy for sustenance, comes to all humans in the form of food. Food is either meat or vegetables. Meat comes from animals that usually eat vegetables. Vegetables gain their energy from the sun. The wealth (poems included) that humans produce is limited by the energy we extract from the sun and material we can extract from the earth. All abstraction comes from physical primitives which are limited by physical laws, thus all abstract products such as poems, literature and art are all limited and thus part of a zero sum game.
Actually if you follow the energy chain of everything to the root, all things end at the sun (nuclear power is an exception). You could say that the sun is basically an unlimited source of energy... but commerce is directly affected by the rate in which we can extract energy from the sun. Since it is physically impossible to extract energy from the sun at an unlimited rate, the rate must therefore be limited and all commerce, products and abstract ideas that arise from usage of this energy must also be, in turn, limited.
If I'm the best farmer its probably in the entire cultures best interest if I get the most farmland because we'll share in the utility of an average increase in production despite the unfair concentration.
If, people earn their pile of wealth by providing the most utility, then them having it is naturally great news. On the other hand if they got their pile via less than fair means, and they are not using their pile of wealth to maximize societal utility, well, then there's no real loss in taxing it away from them, if they're not the "best holders" of that wealth.
> If I'm the best farmer its probably in the entire cultures best interest if I get the most farmland because we'll share in the utility of an average increase in production despite the unfair concentration.
This is probably little consolation to out of work farmers unable to purchase food for lack of employment.
The question is at what point do such concentrations cease to enough of the culture/population to be worth the negative consequence?
It may be more beneficial, over all, for more to have jobs within an industry and thus able to afford essential goods than for maximum efficiency at the cost of fewer able to earn a living.
Let's stay your wealth/income remains static, but most people around you see a great increase in their own wealth/income. You are certainly less better off now because all this extra wealth in your area will increase demand for goods and thus prices. See Bay Area housing market for an example.