I wish I didn't agree so hard with this. But I do. There's an order of things, and if you start with a perfectly level field and perfectly fair rules, it won't take long before you have people at the top who will then make new rules to help them stay there. Perhaps there's a system where that doesn't happen, but I don't know what it would be.
The key thing is to design a system where even if the big players can take most of the rewards for themselves, they can't hurt the people underneath them, and Steemit does that about as well as anything I can imagine. Far better than the government, which is even worse than zero-sum--the people at the top can't get ANYTHING unless they take it from someone else.