Imagine if instead of people protesting against income inequality, they protested against value contribution inequality...
Say I received a million $ from my father (that's income inequality, isn't it?) and now I'm saving all my work income because I can live on my capital gains from "gifts" and watch all my friends work harder and harder to try and earn few extra cents while I'm getting richer doing very little.
My dad did "things", I'm doing "things", and I'm getting paid for it! How would you evaluate my "value contributions" anyway? . My income is growing, I can wait.
PS: for some reasons, my taxes in % of my income keeps decreasing because where I live, capital is less taxed than work. And the politicians who chose that explains they're lowing taxes because other countries are doing the same. So all countries are help the rich because rich are being helped elsewhere. How cool is that?
The markets aren't exclusively available to the rich. Anyone can buy and sell stocks.
Successful people get to live better than the poor. That is why we should do more to encourage more poor people to live better by contributing more.
The economy is not zero-sum.
It's not even close to competitive with hired specialists dedicated to the task. You cannot compete.
It is not contributions not success that makes people live better or longer. It is ownership, diet, mental health (including low stress) access to medical care. Check out how many of successful people actually live shorter or painful lives. Your argument only works for have-nots.
Economy is negative sum, unless you discount externalities. It does not break physics. Mined out and used up materials do not suddenly reappear. We just move the goalposts to have the same "positive money" outlook, keep everything from deflation. Until recently inventions (esp. energy and mining, then production efficiencies), made the economies grow. But it is not an infinite resource.
Contribution is the surest path to financial success. The more value you can contribute and capture, the more wealth our society will reward you with.
The Earth's resources are miniscule compared to the wider universe.
For example, there's a near earth asteroid that we discovered that has enough platinum to turn every person on earth into a billionaire at the current prices.
That's just one of tens of thousands of near earth objects.
Plus, there's millions of asteroids in the asteroid belt when we exhaust those.
Finally, we're already starting to mine them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_mining
So we are not restricted by resources.
Regardless, we live in an information economy that is mainly driven by credit and debt, not mining of resources.
You're also essentially defining an economic aristocracy. Folks with more resources can contribute more value, which in common worldviews associated with what you said suggests they deserve more profit. That's the crassest form of economic attachment, and it's silly to pretend that it's efficient or fair.
A McDonald's fry cook could be a software engineer, but they choose not to.
McDonald's fry cooks protest for $15 minimum wage; instead of spending that time studying programming.
If we protested about not fully utilizing our lower contributing members of society, instead of condemning the highest contributing mebers; we'd have a healthier society.
That position is not considered very strong by modern economic standards.
All protests are against perceived value contribution inequality, and against those perceived as contributing the least (or most negative) value; perhaps more precisely, against those perceived as producing the greatest negative externalized value contribution.
Of course, value being subjective, there are often sharp disputes about who is worthy of that treatment.