billionaires are the modern equivalent to medieval dragons. in folklore, dragons stole and hoarded resources including wealth. They were considered evil because they prevented resources from circulating and being used in the economy.

Well you see, silly, it’s because the billionaires deserve to be at the top of the hierarchy, whereas baristas deserve to be at the bottom. Taking from the rich to give to the poor is just disrupting the natural order of things, which will lead to all sorts of mess.

Society needs a permanent underclass to function, and if the wage slaves are no longer struggling to keep their head above the water, then they might start having funny ideas about radical systemic change, and that’s bad for everyone (especially the wage slaves — their silly ideas will blind them to the humble satisfaction of living a life in the place where they belong)

(This is all sarcasm, of course, but a disconcerting number of people do actually believe things to this effect. I felt like I understood the conservative mindset a lot better once I saw someone explain core ideological motifs of conservatives along these lines.)

Because it is easier for the everyday person to visualize “person work here, person paid here, more pay = more cost” than it is to visualize “one rich fucker is siphoning off 75% of all money going into this store across 14 different levels of the supply chain”. It then gets more reinforced by propaganda because it’s convenient.

LOGIC.

What is the role of “capitalism” here? There were plenty of people who justified the position of slaves, serfs or peasants with similar lines of thinking in tribal and feudal times, long before capitalism existed. In fact, while many societies do not take full (or even much) advantage of modern administrative means permitting extensive income redistribution, it is still true that some modern capitalist systems are the most egalitarian in human history since hunter-gatherer bands.