Maggie's Farm

I believe much of the resentment is merely primitive. In hunter-gatherer societies, a person who had much more, and for no easily-understood reason, was likely cheating. We learned to be reflexively suspicious. This was progressively less-pronounced, but still essentially true in herding, then village and urban societies. There's still something to it, as cheaters will always go where the money is.

But it is no longer true enough to guide our interactions. In fact it is dangerous for societies to hate the wealthy, as YHWH pointed thousands of years ago out with his 10th Commandment.

It doesn't matter if it's good for all of us. It makes us feel bad and we don't like it, so we resent them.