Not really sure why this is surprising to anyone. In many cases the wealthy become so through "unfair" or non-merit based means such as inheritance, luck, personal connections, etc. But in many cases, wealth is also earned. A doctor probably does "deserve" to have a $500k house more than a cashier. It wouldn't make sense for the cashier to receive more than the doctor just because they were poorer to begin with. Actually justifying such a transfer doesn't even compute for me.

The author interprets this as preserving the hierarchy, but I think that's a bit of a stretch. I think people don't want to live in a system that could result in their own wealth being used to enrich others to their own detriment. Sure, taxes and redistribution schemes do that, and you could argue that that's the whole point of capitalism (in the other direction), but it seems perverse and unfair for people to take so much from the wealthiest that the poor end up richer than the wealthy were to begin with.