On Sun, 11 Apr 2010 04:35:33 -0400, "Buerste"
wrote:
snip
Don't you think your kids deserve the fruits of your labor more than the
cheese-checkers? Why do you have ANY assets? There are people with nothing
that DESERVE your stuff? Why should you work hard to provide for your
family...somebody else will.
snip
============

Don't set up a straw man.

The discussion was about the reconcentration of wealth by a few
owners.

As indicated, even if the money/wealth {i.e. productive assets}
were equally distributed, in very short order these would again
become concentrated.

My suggestion is that these would most likely be different
owners/controllers, for several reasons, among which are that the
original founders of the large American fortunes/dynasties have
for the most part passed, and their heirs generally have no idea
how the fortune/dynasty was founded.

It should be noted that different personalities are required at
different stages of estate development. The entrepreneur that
founds the fortune is likely not the person best suited to the
maintenance/growth of the dynasty. Conversely, individuals that
may do very well in the maintainer/management of great wealth may
be poorly suited to the creation of the original wealth.

Another problem is that there must be a match between the
[personality of the] founder of a fortune/dynasty and the
times/locations in which they live, in addition to the very
important factor of luck. While "chance may indeed favor the
prepared mind," it is still chance, and how many times can you
draw to an inside straight? One example is Sam Walton/Wal-Mart.
If Sam had been born and raised in a large urban area such as NY,
Chicago, or LA, would/could he have created Wal-Mart?

Now for the straw man. You do however raise an interesting point,
and one that brings into focus the problem that what is "fair"
for the individual may be unfair and even harmful for society in
the long-term or aggregate.

"Mortmain" {literal "dead hand"} has been a legal problem back
into at least the middle ages, and refers to the control of
property by the long dead through the conditions of their wills
and trusts, such as entailed estates that could not be divided
among several heirs, but had to pass as a unit to a new owner.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortmain
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_against_perpetuities

In the United States the rule against perpetuities has been
abolished by statute in Alaska, Idaho, New Jersey, and South
Dakota. Twenty-eight other U.S. states have adopted the Uniform
Statutory Rule Against Perpetuities, which validates non-vested
interests that would otherwise be void under the common law rule
if that interest actually vests within 90 years of its creation.

It should be noted where economies have become dominated by
"mainmort" "trusts" and other pools of inherited wealth, progress
of any kind is very slow, wealth distribution tends to become
increasingly unequal, and social stability is increasingly
marginal, e.g. Mexico and most of Latin America.

Unka George (George McDuffee)
...............................
The past is a foreign country;
they do things differently there.
L. P. Hartley (1895-1972), British author.
The Go-Between, Prologue (1953).