If you suppress variations in income, society as a whole ends up poorer.

http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html

Great article on how wealth is generated, difference between wealth and money and that when you suppress variations in income, whether by theft or by taxes, the result always seems to be the same - society as a whole ends up poorer. We need rich people in society, because of what they have to do to be rich - create value, from which we all benefit. This is interesting and explains the behavior of why young people and professors are usually marxists:

"This is just as true today, though few of us create wealth directly for ourselves (except for a few vestigial domestic tasks). Mostly we create wealth for other people in exchange for money, which we then trade for the forms of wealth we want.

Because kids are unable to create wealth, whatever they have has to be given to them. And when wealth is something you're given, then of course it seems that it should be distributed equally.

Part of the reason this subject is so contentious is that some of those most vocal on the subject of wealth—university students, heirs, professors, politicians, and journalists—have the least experience creating it. (This phenomenon will be familiar to anyone who has overheard conversations about sports in a bar.)

Students are mostly still on the parental dole, and have not stopped to think about where that money comes from. Heirs will be on the parental dole for life. Professors and politicians live within socialist eddies of the economy, at one remove from the creation of wealth, and are paid a flat rate regardless of how hard they work. And journalists as part of their professional code segregate themselves from the revenue-collecting half of the businesses they work for (the ad sales department). Many of these people never come face to face with the fact that the money they receive represents wealth—wealth that, except in the case of journalists, someone else created earlier. They live in a world in which income is doled out by a central authority according to some abstract notion of fairness (or randomly, in the case of heirs), rather than given by other people in return for something they wanted, so it may seem to them unfair that things don't work the same in the rest of the economy.!"

I also recommend reading this article: how to create wealth and especially this one: What you can´t say.