Liberals agree that it feels wrong "when an employee who needs their job is fired"; "that it's morally wrong that rich children inherit a lot of money while poor children inherit nothing"; and they describe themselves as often having "tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me".
With devastating delicacy, it illustrates the principle of deceleration by which the idle rich allow inherited privilege to trickle through their fingers until they suddenly find themselves the idle dispossessed.
The great 19th-century capitalists, Carnegie and Rockefeller, took this view; and so, evidently, does Mr Buffett, who told a television interviewer that "a market system has not worked in terms of poor people" and derided those made rich by inherited wealth as "members of the lucky-sperm club .A second reason is practical.
Once again Republicans have shown that they want to tax the dollars a working person earns, but the millions or billions a rich kid inherits.
Warren's comments are particularly compelling when you consider the fact that, as Robert Reich point out, an increasing number of rich Americans inherited their wealth.
The Republican proposal for taxable estates doesn't change life for ordinary households but, as the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities documents, rich kids inheriting their parents' money would receive an average $1.1 million in tax breaks -- while parents working to support their children or put them through college would pay more.
A 1997 study found that over half of the country's richest Americans inherited at least $1m, a headstart that most can't even dream of.
He drove off into a sparkling, glamorous metropolis, none the wiser but very much richer, having inherited a large chunk of Clerkenwell real estate from a dead lover.
Judging by their actions, they seem to prefer a society in which your station in life is largely determined by that of your parents — and in which the children of the very rich get to inherit their estates tax-free.
Mankiewicz was summing up the era of "The Front Page" at the end of it, and was treating it right at its source in the American system that made it possible for a rich boy to inherit the power to control public opinion as his own personal plaything.
