Daniel Drezner has an interesting post on the idle rich and the problems of inherited wealth. Drezner, not even remotely an equality fanatic, admits:

However, whenever I see a promo for the Hilton sisters on television, I find myself reflexively muttering under my breath, "they'll be the first ones up against the wall when the revolution comes."

Let me give an example. David Friedman is an exceptionally talented economist (disclosure: I got to co-author a paper with him once) and a professor of law at the University of Santa Clara (his specialty is law and economics.) He has no formal training in economics (his Ph.D. is in physics). So how did he get to be an economist? His mother is Rose Friedman, a very capable economist who did some important work on income distribution before she gave up her career to raise her children. His father is Milton Friedman, easily one of the half dozen most important economists of the past century. So it is safe to say that, given he had learned the subject since childhood, it is unlikely he would have learned much more in graduate school. That, folks, is a big inheritance, which David Friedman deserves as much, but no more, than the Hilton sisters deserve their inheritance.

Or consider this. Drezner is a very smart guy. He tells us he is struggling for tenure at Chicago. Hah. Most academics are lucky if Chicago even lets them use the bathroom. His jokes about Jewish guilt suggest parents who were ambitious for their son. It is a good bet he inherited more than a bit of his intelligence from their genes. Quite an inheritance. By comparison, when I was in high school, I tutored a fellow student who eventually dropped out. He was not particularly smart or ambitious. My guess is that he working as a store clerk somewhere, without either Drezner's salary or job perks (which include a job that is an awful lot of fun). He father had abandoned the family some years earlier. I did not know much about his mother, although I gather just keeping her son out of the gangs in the housing projects they lived in was no small accomplishment, and left her without the energy to keep him at school work. My tutoring did nothing more than getting him to study. Not much of an inheritance. I am baffled why anyone thinks inheriting ambition and intelligence is somehow different, or more deserved, than inheriting money.

UPDATE: Tom Smith at the interesting new blog, The Right Coast, seems to having a similar attack of selective indignation.