[nhaehnle]

This may come as a surprise to you, too, but the IMF has finally caught on to the fact that inequality hurts economic development: http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2011/sdn1108.pdf

Obviously, forced total equality is unlikely to be good either. But from a certain point, inequality causes macro-economic imbalances that prevent natural growth of the pie.

Besides, what the "pie fallacy" ignores is to discuss the relationship between income and wealth and the talent required to obtain it. Think about it that way: by almost all measures in almost all areas, talent, work ethics, whatever you can think of, it is all essentially normally distributed. But if income should reflect those virtues, then we would expect income to be essentially normally distributed as well. So why do income and wealth essentially follow an exponential distribution?

Something really fishy is going on there, and it is only appropriate to challenge a status quo that leads to such an outcome.