Wealth inequality is a good thing too. People who work harder necessarily live better lives. If you want to start stealing their hard work to give to the lazy, you're going to find that the hard-working flee the country à la the USSR.
There is no evidence that rich people work harder than poor people. In fact the opposite is far more likely to be true given the unique stresses of manual labour.
And there is no evidence that the driver of success is providing for their offspring. There are a whole range of factors at play.
It's not about working hard, it's about working smart. I.e. leverage.
For example, my patio door kept getting stuck. I spend a lot of time with a file and chisel trying and failing to get it to fit properly. Finally, I bought a grinder for a few bucks from the pawn shop and had it fixed in a couple minutes, and it looked a lot better, too.
But you earn orders of magnitude more.
Income and wealth aren't solely functions of who worked the hardest and they never have been.
Nothing is stopping someone from employing their wealth to build a yacht, fifteen McMansions, and a thirty-foot solid-gold Mothman statue just after getting off of a six-month prison stint for a billion dollars of ecological damage (all purely hypothetical but I would assert entirely plausible); that people exist with the right to exchange a colossal amount of wealth to be allowed to waste an equally colossal amount of actual effort and resources is the problem.
I won't say nobody has an issue with individual people being allowed to direct huge amounts of funding, but I would assert that more people recognize that extravagant waste for the purpose of status should not be scaled to the extant degree of wealth disparity.
This isn't to say that I would accuse the majority (or even very many) individuals in positions where they're able to leverage a lot of wealth of anything specifically this egregious, but rather that because they're able to control many resources because their efforts have enormous leverage (and therefore are worth more to the system they operate in), they can consume orders of magnitude more resources to gain comparably minuscule increases in personal utility.
In addition, because of how valuable their leverage makes their effort, when they cause damage whose negative value is on the scale of individuals, the disparity leads a system that's self-interested to forgive them much more quickly--if someone can get 1% more value out of 10 billion dollars' resources than anyone else, that system doesn't have any purely value-driven reason to replace them in their position if they should murder someone and its negative effects never amount to more than a couple million dollars' loss in value. From any ethical standpoint that holds "death at the whims of billionaires" incompatible with "certain unalienable rights", this is a problem.
I'm not making the suggestion that those who are wealthy should divest themselves of their wealth and donate it to charity, the point I'm intending to communicate is that such leverage shouldn't act as a pass to engage in unethical behavior.
Genuinely smart people with genuinely valuable skill (like Musk or Jobs) would work equally hard whether their offspring were set to inherit 10 million or 10 billion dollars.
The words "CITATION NEEDED"— in bold 72 point-font flashing letters—spring to mind.
Do you have any data, or other evidence, to back that claim up?
Do you believe people without children have no motivation to work hard?