[hackyhacky]

It's not irrelevant. It wasn't irrelevant when the same arguments were made in favor of feudal lords. People want to fairly compensated: the premise of "a day's pay for a day's work" is based on it. If the idle rich are vacuuming up profits that properly belong to the working class, you're asking for a revolution. There is absolutely nothing to suggest a causal relationship between massive wealth in the upper classes and any benefit for the rest of society. last time that happened in the US, the robber barons and Wall Street class nearly brought down the world economy.

[hcurtiss]

I don't recall what arguments were made in favor of feudal lords. And one could hardly call that system "capitalism," which is the subject of this thread. I maintain that the relevant objective should be the best outcome for the most. There is abundant objective evidence that capitalism is the economic system best suited to that objective, even if it produces varying degrees -- and sometimes large amounts -- of income inequality.

[hackyhacky]

Feudalism is the end-state of capitalism, as I've already commented: it is the consequence of all capital (typically, arable land) ending in the hands of a select few (lords), who then derive income by renting it out (tenant farmer system). As a result, the lords themselves never contribute labor and exist only as parasites on a system dependent on laborers who have no opportunity to acquire capital.

[hcurtiss]

I can think of no capitalist society in the last thousand years that has produced feudalism.

[hackyhacky]

Then you aren't trying very hard or (more likely) pretending to not know history.

Every feudalist society began with the accumulation of capital. That's what land ownership is. It happened in mainland Europe and Britain, it happened in Russia, it happened in Japan. Any society with land-owning "lords".

How do you think they got to be lords? Hard work?