Generational wealth transfer is a good thing. It's the main reason most people work hard in life - to provide a better life for their offspring.
Wealth inequality is a good thing too. People who work harder necessarily live better lives. If you want to start stealing their hard work to give to the lazy, you're going to find that the hard-working flee the country à la the USSR.
This comment is insulting and has no basis in fact.
There is no evidence that rich people work harder than poor people. In fact the opposite is far more likely to be true given the unique stresses of manual labour.
And there is no evidence that the driver of success is providing for their offspring. There are a whole range of factors at play.
> There is no evidence that rich people work harder than poor people.
It's not about working hard, it's about working smart. I.e. leverage.
For example, my patio door kept getting stuck. I spend a lot of time with a file and chisel trying and failing to get it to fit properly. Finally, I bought a grinder for a few bucks from the pawn shop and had it fixed in a couple minutes, and it looked a lot better, too.
I think the primary issue is not precisely 'wealth inequality' but rather a lack of accountability and responsibility from people with large amounts of wealth. If one has assets whose value is representative of the life's work of several thousand people, it's one thing to have someone who is demonstrably capable and responsible manage it, and another thing entirely to have someone /own/ it. If I had to guess (and I clearly am) a larger proportion of people are upset with the latter than the former.
Nothing is stopping someone from employing their wealth to build a yacht, fifteen McMansions, and a thirty-foot solid-gold Mothman statue just after getting off of a six-month prison stint for a billion dollars of ecological damage (all purely hypothetical but I would assert entirely plausible); that people exist with the right to exchange a colossal amount of wealth to be allowed to waste an equally colossal amount of actual effort and resources is the problem.
I won't say nobody has an issue with individual people being allowed to direct huge amounts of funding, but I would assert that more people recognize that extravagant waste for the purpose of status should not be scaled to the extant degree of wealth disparity.
If you own your house, is it unfair that you don't share it with all the people who contributed to building it? Or is it fair that you paid them what they asked for their efforts?
This is not really the point that I'm arguing--my point would be that if you wanted your house entirely encrusted in precious jewels, each of which was individually polished by a team of people paid 50 USD an hour to do this weekly, nothing stops you from making that decision even though you are monopolizing a large quantity of resources for status, almost entirely. Someone with a large amount of wealth is generally within their rights to do this, which I would view as a problem.
This isn't to say that I would accuse the majority (or even very many) individuals in positions where they're able to leverage a lot of wealth of anything specifically this egregious, but rather that because they're able to control many resources because their efforts have enormous leverage (and therefore are worth more to the system they operate in), they can consume orders of magnitude more resources to gain comparably minuscule increases in personal utility.
In addition, because of how valuable their leverage makes their effort, when they cause damage whose negative value is on the scale of individuals, the disparity leads a system that's self-interested to forgive them much more quickly--if someone can get 1% more value out of 10 billion dollars' resources than anyone else, that system doesn't have any purely value-driven reason to replace them in their position if they should murder someone and its negative effects never amount to more than a couple million dollars' loss in value. From any ethical standpoint that holds "death at the whims of billionaires" incompatible with "certain unalienable rights", this is a problem.
There's been a surge in real estate values lately. I've yet to see any homeowner decide they owe part of that gain to the people who built the house or the folks who mow their lawns.
I'm... confused as to what your interpretation of my comments here is. I'm explicitly stating that the issue isn't about people deciding they owe something to other people, or what the market decides the value of something is--it is about people in highly-leveraged positions who are currently able to waste resources or actively cause damage with some impunity because of the value their leverage allows them to provide.
I'm not making the suggestion that those who are wealthy should divest themselves of their wealth and donate it to charity, the point I'm intending to communicate is that such leverage shouldn't act as a pass to engage in unethical behavior.
I simply disagree that an economic incentive is necessary or useful for people with extreme wealth. Already rich people who are primarily motivated by the accumulation of wealth are unlikely to have some unique skill that society needs in our active labour force. If our tax structure made them more likely to retire early, our workforce would not be starved of useful skill.
Genuinely smart people with genuinely valuable skill (like Musk or Jobs) would work equally hard whether their offspring were set to inherit 10 million or 10 billion dollars.
Wealth inequality is a good thing too. People who work harder necessarily live better lives. If you want to start stealing their hard work to give to the lazy, you're going to find that the hard-working flee the country à la the USSR.