This may be old hat, but I had an interesting thought about the interplay between the concentration of wealth and fertility. It's well-known that as people get richer they tend to have fewer children, and to have them later in life. The natural result of this correlation is that over generations, wealthy families will dilute their resources much more slowly than average and poor families.
(Of course, many poor parents leave nothing to any of their children, but ignore the technicalities for the moment. There is probably a threshold level of wealth that must be met for children to receive anything from their parents, and the existence of such a threshold would further heighten the concentration of wealth effect.)
For example, consider two families, A and B, with equal wealth but differing fertility. Family A has 2 children every 33 years, and family B has 3 children every 25 years. After 100 years, the latest generation of family A will have 8 members (2*2*2), and the latest generation of family B will have 81 members (3*3*3*3). The wealth of the progenetors of family A will be far less diluted than the wealth of the progenetors of family B.
After 100 years, the aggregate wealth of family B may be greater than that of family A, simply due to its greater number of productive members. However, assuming that any member of either family is able to generate an equal amount of wealth on their own through working, the difference in wealth between any two individuals will be attributable to what they inherited from their ancestors. The concentration of wealth for family A will certainly be greater, and each individual member of A will be wealthier than each individual member of B.
Additionally, the members of these families will probably not care about their family's aggregate wealth, especially in the case of family B where the 81 great-great-grandchildren are unlikely to even know each other, much less be willing and able to wield their combined wealth toward any profitable end.
Aside from every other social and economic factor that encourages the concentration of capital, it appears that simple arithmetic creates a positively reinforced cycle that leads to the concentration of wealth. Even assuming equal-wealth starting conditions, differences in fertility will lead to differences in wealth, over time.
The way to stop the ever-increasing concentration of wealth is to get rid of inheritance (NOT inheritance tax), trust funds, and nepotism.
>>>Think of all the benefits:
1) No more people like George Bush and Bin Laden
to ru(i)n the world for us with their silver spoon leadership(s).
2) A level playing field where all people start out with the same amount of money when they become legal age... so there will be no reason to be ashamed of one's wealth, and no (or less) reason to be pissed off about being poor... because you will have had an equal opportunity to stockpile.
3) With a 100% estate tax, you could reduce, or probably totally eliminate, the need for income tax and capital gains tax OR you could take all the revenue each year and divide it up between every legal age citizen (kind of like a tax return)
>>>Problem is, if the U.S. went to this system, the richest people would probably move to another country, so you must do this on the level of the U.N., having penalties for countries that don't comply to getting rid of economic oppression.
>>>Problem with that would be that the elite of the U.S.A. would likely convince their people that this is evil and would penalize individuals who speak out for the implementation of this system... and if the U.S. and other countries of the world who have recent or ongoing royalty systems do not comply, then the U.N. sanctions will basically be useless until their peoples can be convinced that they need to take control, all at once, on some secret preplanned day.
...Which will be impossible to preplan with all of the now existing surveilance put in place since 911, so the peoples will need to learn to read and write in braille.
none: It's been tried before, and called "communism". It's never worked, nor will it ever.