A Self Destructive Cycle.

"Money" is too simple an answer. Your real question is why are these things constantly changing in this direction. In the US, this is driven by monetary policy - i.e. the government. In the US, we have nothing backing our currency but "the full faith and credit" of the country. Which is meaningless. Whenever the Fed prints up some billions of dollars to buy debt from the government, it reduces the value of all the money already in circulation. This doesn't affect rich people. do you think Donald Trump has a lot of money? Nay, nay. He has a lot of PROPERTY. He only has money when he is converting one set of property into another. Well, who DOES have money? Answer: you and I. Anyone with a nest egg, a retirement fund, a rainy day account, anyone who has a bank account. THAT is where the value of the money the Fed uses to buy T-bills comes from. The net result, money is worth less, so prices rise. So long as prices rise, there are opportunities for people to flip properties around to take advantage of the fact, because the change in value is never 100% even. Donald Trump's properties will always be worth what they are worth, the money in your bank account won't be. In fact, since the Fed has kept lending rates at near 0, and since the actual inflation rate is running around 5% (do NOT believe the "official" inflation figure, that's a lie to prevent having to increase Social Security payouts) your value of anything in a savings account is dropping at 3-4% per year. Everything else follows from this. The problem is exacerbated because the government won't leave things alone long enough to settle down, thousands of laws and regulations change every year, the entire financial state is in a constant state of jitters because the rules are constantly changing.

There was an era (pre-Nixon) where a dollar had a certain amount of gold backing it. Theoretically, you could trade in your paper and get your piece of gold back. In fact, even then the government would fiddle with the exchange rate, but the fact that a dollar had something of real value behind it meant it had, in a sense, more mass, more inertia, in finance, and so things proceeded at a more deliberate pace. Of course there were still complexities like wars, and other effects on the system. Our financial system probably hasn't really been healthy since the 19th century. As more and more of it comes under the control of politicians, they and their cronies will benefit from it, and you see what happens as they do. Obama's policies have made the problem even worse, he loves to rail about income inequality, but he doesn't like it when Republicans point out that income inequality has significantly increased since he took office.

The things you are complaining of are an inevitable consequence of people bilking the system. Now many people claimed the "rich" were bilking the system and that was the excuse the politician's gave in "reforming" it - but the rich were really just benefiting from BEING rich. Now it isn't what you know, or even what you own, it's WHO you know. It's no accident that companies like Solyndra pop up, get big bucks from the gov't, and then vanish away taking the money with them, leaving the bill for the party for us. We used to be able to TELL who was rich and who wasn't, but it is much harder to spot when an Obama bundler shows up to put HIS hand in the till. It's much easier to rob people that way.