In the government, large swathes of the financial world and a not insignificant segment of the services industry - income is predominantly a function of social networking and verbal acuity in individuals, and, yes, sometimes (sometimes even often) parasitism in organizations.
Elsewhere, e.g. competitive business, science, manufacturing , software industry, etc, income is determined by the ability to 'get things done' which in turn largely depends on intelligence and work.
How this relates to states at large depends on their economic structure.
In the west where we now have a mostly service based economy and more recently even worse - 'financialization' - it seems to that extent wealth inequality cannot be accounted for by natural inequality - differences in intelligence, work ethic, interests etc between people.
This is less true for developed East Asian countries like Japan which still have industrial economies that the western world used to have until the late 20th century, and in which financial markets don't dominate.
Wealth inequality, ultimately, is a question of degree and source.
Do you wish for it to be rooted in natural differences between men on the one hand, as in industrial economies, or by status, hereditary class, parasitism etc on the other?
The R/P ratio at 10% i.e. the ratio of incomes at the top 10% to the bottom 10% in the US is about 16, in the UK it is 14, but in Japan it's 5.
The problem is that you leftists have a hard time understanding that:
1) Income inequality is as natural to any functionally sustainable state - note those two modifiers I used because that rules out your utopian wet dreams of communism - as the consequences of inequality in ability, personality, interests etc are to human affairs.
2) To put that point more precisely there is an inherent trade-off beyond some point between efficiency/productivity and that ratio as it approaches 1; I'm not familiar with the empirical literature on this but I am willing to bet a large sum of money that the critical ratio is around that of Japan's. In fact that ratio is also likely to rise into the future as technology (e.g. artificial intelligence) continues to accentuate the effect of human capital on economic output (but that is a story for another day).
3) Virtually every other type of economy aside from industrial economies, in the long-run, tend to the latter source but you morons are perfectly fine with e.g. the displacement of manufacturing by a services industry (inseparable from globalism and free-trade in the developed world) even as you rage against the 'banks.'
