"Dave Stadt" wrote in message
om...

"Rich Lemert" wrote in message
The question I would ask, though, is what have his heirs done (other
than have better luck choosing their family) that would justify calling
them "successful"?

So to follow your line of thinking every successful business that is
started
should be closed when the founder goes west to prevent his/her heirs from
benefiting from dad's success.

Not necessarily. It's possible to acknowledge a variety of competing factors
that legitimately bear on ownership and inheritance, and accordingly to
forge a policy that compromises among them--a policy of taxation, for
example, that preserves incentives but still opposes the unlimited
cross-generational accumulation of wealth by some people (an accumulation
that can occur regardless of the heirs' merit) while other people, due to
the circumstances *they* inherit, face almost insurmountable obstacles from
birth (again regardless of their merit). Inheritance (like anything else)
needn't be all or nothing.

--Gary