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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: neolib who wrote (31439)	11/13/2006 5:53:40 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541878

3) Accumulated wealth can be used wisely to accumulate more wealth, beyond what can be acquired by ones own labor. That fact helps increase class mobility. If you couldn't accumulate the wealth you couldn't move up, and the rich truly would be a separate social class that consists of the same people staying on top of everyone else. There are some people who are motivated to gain more wealth, no matter how much money they have, but the incentive to work hard isn't increased by having more wealth, it can be decreased, and the incentive to take risks is also decreased. Maybe neither factor hits the 1st generation, the person who created the wealth, but the succeeding generations don't automatically have the same skills or drive, and typically don't have the type of out sized returns that the 1st generation had. At the same time the fortune gets divided between multiple heirs. The European aristocrats controlled the land, at a time when land wasn't generally freely available. They also had political/legal advantages. They could often directly or indirectly take wealth from the rest of the country, and they had the power and control to keep other people down. None of those advantages amounts to success in a capitalist free market, quite the opposite. As markets became more free the aristocracy had less of an advantage. Many aristocratic families lost wealth relative to their countrymen.