I second that emotion, and add the words of a great Republican from another era:

“I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate.”
— Theodore Roosevelt

@p-nullifidian but what would we do if as a result of this redistribution of wealth to level the playing field we spawned a whole new generation of citizens that created new wealth and prosperity at large, wouldn't that be communism?

@SnowyOwl I don’t believe that Roosevelt was addressing the topic of wealth redistribution, per se. The problem as he saw it was a small fraction of the population gaining enormous wealth, and passing that wealth to their heirs who had won the lottery simply by being born into their families. These idle rich robber barons, as he saw them, were undeserving of their inheritances. Even Andrew Carnegie, who was one of the richest men in the world, agreed with this philosophy, and sought to give away as much of his fortune as he could before he passed on. Carnegie said, “a man who dies with money in the bank dies disgraced!”

Our disgrace as a country, IMHO, is to have allowed the wealthy to become what is effectively our form of royalty. We don’t have dukes and duchesses or princes and princesses, but we do have Vanderbilts, Hiltons, Waltons and Trumps. An inherited fortune is a moral outrage and should be corrected by “resetting the clock” for every child of wealth. And don’t hand it off directly to others who haven’t earned it, but use it to pay down the national debt, public education, infrastructure or what may be deemed the common good.