Just chickeny is crooky...was: American Middle Clbutt: Endangered Species

JC never cites his sources, but I'll cite mine (I read the book): "What Happened To Their Kids? Children of the Rich and Famous" by Malcom Forbes (yep, the rich guy), and in once sentence he wrote in the blub I quote "Why do so many of the world's great leaders and acheivers make such terrible parents?" shows that the kids are badly treated, ignored, or worse, and the failure rate among the kids is high. I hear as often of kids who are disgusted with the poverty of their parents and, happily, work their way up and actually make better human beings out of themselves. What "data" you, JC, may be thinking about is the well known demographic that a higher percentage of the kids of rich parents go to college and primarily at the proding and help (money) of the parents and not genetics. Then, there is the fact that 1-4 of all rich people get their money from their inheritance from their rich parents (also, only indirectly related to genetics but directly by will or estate planning) and a high fraction of them pee their money away rather than build on it (eg. the Dupont family that no one of which has any office in the Dupont corporation any more). And, so, it boils down to a question as to how one justifies obscene levels wealth on any grounds of "deserving" or other "redeming" actions or activities that led to the wealth. Considering the likes of monopolists such as Bill Gates, crooks like Kenneth Lay et al., we could easily estimate that at least another 1-4 of rich people really did NOT earn their riches. Most of the rest exploited people, economies of scale, and tricks of tax accountants and tax lawyers and special deals from government contracts to, essentially, "steal" money from the US Treasury and thereby US taxpayers in a mbuttive transfer of wealth from a large number of underlings to a few overlings.