Ok ... I'm pretty sure I'm going to express this badly - but I'll try...
A long long time ago, humans got humanized in places where small numbers of them grouped together and cooperated/traded/shared with each other for day-to-day life.
There might be a (for example) wandering minstrel, who might spend a week or four in each of 20-or-so places. Each of those 20-or-so places (and their surrounding area) might have 150-people-or-so, who would chip in to cover the minstrel's room-and-board-and-drink. It wasn't a rich living (for sure), but one could (in theory) get by). Let's call it 10~30 multi-talented bard/actor/repair-man for every ~3000 inhabitants.
To the degree that people were literate/educated or Western Europeans, they might swap bible stories and memorize the 10 commandments. Amongst which would be admonitions against greed, envy and lust. (The Buddhist would similarly admonish against intoxicants - except they weren't incredibly dedicated to banning stuff...)
So ... fast forward a while. We've got winner take all markets. Let's talk music/film, not sports (but the math can be considered similar): Instead of having maybe 1 itenerate per thousand people, we've 1 superstar per 5~10M people. Woah! Now it's big money, so we've got back-up staff, support, stages, studios, advertising, promos, sponsorship - but it went from (say) $100/month to $10M/month.
Now back to the sins of lust/greed/envy: I believe that we (humans) were not built to envy our neighbor's goods at that scale. There was no Bill Gates. There was not even a David Rockefeller!
So you get a guy (or girl) who is willing to provide a product (or service) to national or global markets, that people want, at a price that they are willing to pay, at a cost-to-produce dramatically less than that price (on a per-unit basis). You have the recipe for a kajillionairre, by that person simply making the world a better price by providing more/better stuff for less. (Or in the Steve Jobs case: by making a religion out of a pocket computer).
But! As wealthy as we all become, with our jobs and income, and housing and clean water and indoor plumbing and always-on-electricity and wireless internet and 24-7 entertainment and a global library at our fingertips and an every improving environment (on most metrics - you would have to track data and not watch the news to learn this), many of us, with our hold Monkey-DNA encoded greed/envy/competitiveness, are jealous of the "Captains of Industry" that have made our lives to much better. And we want to take their money ("The 1%!") and distribute it to a bunch of morons that (from what I can tell) are trust-fund babies that can't hold down a job. (Or even find a place to defecate that is not a police car - given how some of the denizens of OWS behaved).
So! (It took a while to get here). Do you believe that income and wealth equality could be, should be, a first-order goal, given that our current system has generated so much wealth? Why would we want to tear down something that is working for all of us, for the purpose of instituting an abstract noun that no one seems to be able to define? For my part, I'd rather be an increasingly wealthy part of the 99% and am grateful to the 1% for dragging us along with them...