If you were me you would not call names or insult when asked to provide your logic or facts that lead to your conclusion (if you saw only "ignorance" then you need to go back and read some more).
Danger, I was waiting for you to say simply, "Fine, I'm ignorant. Please educate me." (To EBR.)
Because he's using the I-word to take a moral high ground, but if he has facts on his side, our esteemed colleague should wield them.
The wealth gap and corruption have gone hand in hand throughout history, but I'm not sure the former causes the latter. It certainly exacerbates it.
Look at the the French, Russian, and Cuban revolutions. When not only the political class, but the people feeding off of them, are pushing their snouts in the trough while the populace goes hungry, that's when the shyt hits the fan. People will only take so much.
However, corruption will always exist, and what replaced those systems didn't fare much better. In fact, they were/are arguably worse.
In Cuba's case, prior to Castro it was a banana republic with a lousy dictator, a mafia- and foreign conglomerate-run economy, and a lot of poor people. After Castro, it was a puppet nation for the Soviets with a lousy dictator and a lot of poor people but with better health care or something. Americans talk about our politicians being "cucks" but look at Battista and Castro.
It's one thing America is a little bit better at, which is finding a way for the populace to have some baseline that keeps them from going ape shyt. Bread and circuses. As long as people are comfortable, not much will change. But the more the decadent elite class in DC expands at the expense of everyone else, the higher the chances of some real shyt going down.
taiyuu_otoko did a good job explaining how it all works in his post. The elite can afford throwing sheckles at the poor if it keeps them from uprising and messing everything up. Remember Bush's $300 tax rebates? And of course Democrats have their own more ceremonious versions of this ("we extended unemployment!"). Americans are also a little more level headed and not homogeneous, and I think less prone to a giant revolution. The 30s and the 60s/70s were great opportunities for something crazy to happen, and it didn't. (The 60s get exaggerated with all of the student protests; on the other hand the civil rights movement was laser-focused and effective.)
In the end, in my opinion, corruption isn't caused by inequality. It exists in any system. BUT, inequality can feed corruption. Inequality (in the economic sense) is not unique to capitalism. I'm open to some kind of blend of systems if it works for me. For instance, I'd rather pay a little more in taxes not to have to shop around for crappy American health care and avoid "copays" and "deductibles," which are a scam.
I think it's curious how few people can hold two thoughts at once on the subject.