The entire raison d'etre of left politics is that gross wealth disparities are a leading indicator of one class of economic actors exploiting another to the general detriment of the latter. The socialist ideal is that everyone works a bit and nobody has to work too much because the system selects for maximizing the collective good rather than hoarding and leverage. This is, of course, never attained in practice early socialist thinkers had an overly simplistic view of humanity and thought that it was just a matter of raising people with a different set of values for a generation or two.

On the other hand, the capitalistic view of humanity as creatures of pure self interest or the economic notion of people being rationalist utility maximizers are also deeply flawed.