Capitalism is a top-down system. And for the most-part, the more top-down capitalism is, the more efficient/productive it is.
When you're talking about capitalism and efficiency, you're talking about an "economy of scale".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale
If everyone owned equal amounts of land, it would be pointless to build massive tractors/combines/harvesters, and other heavy equipment. The biggest harvesters would only get a return on investment if the farmer owned thousands of acres.
The bigger the corporation, generally the more-efficient and profitable. As much as people talk of the benefits of "competition". You don't really want a hundred different car companies, or cell-phone companies. In most cases, you need two or three. Enough to have competition, but not enough to prevent an economy-of-scale.
In some cases, it isn't even practical to have any direct competition(think of the electrical grid). Though there is still competition from neighboring systems, which create pseudo-competition.
And this doesn't even include the human factors.
Imagine you took 100 random people and put them on 100 acres of land. How would you organize the land to be most-productive? Before you answer, you need to imagine the attitudes, behaviors, abilities, and temperaments of 100 random people.
The truth is, a large portion of the people are either lazy, unambitious, irrational, and/or incompetent. And out of 100 random people, there are going to be a few who are very hard-working, ambitious, calm, and capable. If you want someone to organize your 100 acres to be the most-productive, you need to place those people into positions of authority.
And you don't want to just divvy up the 100 acres between the 100 people. You would want maybe two farms, of roughly-equal size, and have the most-capable men running them, with everyone else working for those two men. Or doing other jobs.
Basically, the ideal world for production, is one in which a handful of the most-intelligent, most-capable, and most-ambitious men, own everything, and organize it for maximum profit. And where they cannot directly have control, they should distribute their authority down to others, in a hierarchy.
Moreover, capitalism is about "trade". But for someone to want to trade, he has to see that his time(IE his money), is worth trading for someone else's time(IE their money).
But, if everyone was making equal wages, then there would be less trade. Why pay someone $100 for something you could just in the same amount of time? You only trade when you believe there is an advantage to trading.
The best way to keep people trading, is to manipulate prices and wages, to maximize trade/consumption. In this sense, money tends to "trickle-down". With the wealthy buying goods from the middle-class, and the middle-class buying goods from the lower-class.
But without some way to move the money from the lower-classes back up to the top, this "circular-flow" would stop.
Which is why the machinations of finance, and especially the Federal-Reserve(and other fiat systems) are so important. They are what keeps the economic "pump" going. You need to keep the people in debt, to keep the money flowing to the banks. But also, through debt, you are able to use "fractional-reserve" banking to expand the money supply, further pumping new dollars into the system at the top.
The Federal Reserve system is what allows the stock-market to continue going up, seemingly indefinitely. You just print off new dollars, and then inject them into stock/asset markets, giving more capital to the holders of those assets.
The Federal Reserve system is what allows the stock-market to rise 7-10% a year, seemingly forever. And that produces trillions of dollars in capital every year, which can then be used to buy "real-assets", all over the world(oil, farmland, etc).
Also, taxes themselves are a system of trickle-down(though less-directly). And if you look at Washington D.C., you'll see not only huge wealth-inequality within the city, but the D.C. area contains about six of the ten richest counties in America.
Taxes pull money away from one place, and then put it into another. Its why every state is desperate to keep their military bases, and government contracts.
The alternative, is for everyone to be poor dirt-farmers.
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