It allows what it allows in any particular time and place.  Most of the time, yes, you're entirely correct.  The modern era is a particularly extreme example of that, but it's also the product of a decades long attack on an electoral democracy that in the pre-war and post-war period had set up a legal and economic system that was distinctly unfriendly to the mass accumulation of the richest few.

I also think there's an element of systemic stress and danger that promotes effective policies and effective government, on the one hand, and (in the modern era) opens the door to greater political participation by the commoners.  The difference in the political atmosphere between pre-WWI and post-WWI was like night and day.  Part of this was the recognition of just what a full mobilization of the state for war would require.  Part of this was the recognition that the working classes were really necessary in a way that a lot of the elites had let themselves forget in the long and lazy 19th century.  Part of this was the recognition by the working classes that this necessity gave them the power to demand political participation and economic reform.  And part of it was that the Red Terror.

Nowadays, it seems that too many people think there's no real danger to the system remaining, so it's time to get fat and lazy and inefficient.  We've won, so it's time to divvy the spoils.