The rich have to have some tools for keeping their wealth and giving their progeny a boost. It’s one of the reasons to become rich. The incentive to become rich is what drives a meritocratic free-enterprise economy, which I will define as one in which successful allocators of capital get to allocate capital. Therefore, being wealthy must have perks, and there is no a priori reason they should be qualitatively limited to the purchase of luxury goods.
We all know the warning that democracies tend to fail when the people discover that they can vote themselves largesse out of the public treasury. Get whose money they tend to vote themselves. Consequently, a stable democracy is very likely to empower those who have wealth to keep enough of it to matter. They will, of course, try to vote to keep too much of it, and that’s where one hopes the political system is sufficiently balanced to step in.
Inheritable wealth is a good thing, but too much of most good things is a bad thing. An estate tax redistributes some of the wealth of those whose talent for making things is no longer available to us. It’s a good idea, and, if I were looking for a litmus test of whether the country is headed in the right or wrong direction regarding concentration of wealth, it would be whether it has a dynasty-busting estate tax.
All existing conditions must be compared to the other available options. People have tried to run countries without rich people, and the result seems to be that thugs take their place at the political bargaining table. Then the thugs become extra-legally rich, and the people even poorer, because there is no mobility at all. So, rather than overstate the case that the US is by some binary test “not” a meritocracy, we should consider the ways in which the golden goose can continue to keep some of its eggs for itself as compensation for laying them.
When the SJWs say “mend it, don’t end it,” progress is made. Indeed, one has to take a pretty myopic view of our history not to notice that progress has already been made. It’s slower than it would be if people could handle change better than they can handle it, but we’re dealing with human beings here, and there is no viable alternative in that regard. I’m not counseling patience. That’s too self-serving. But I am defending as ultimately beneficial to all the slow yielding of resistance to impatience, which is a different thing.
So, yes, equality of opportunity is a nice idea, but the opportunity must include the opportunity to make our children’s opportunities unequal. Finding the equilibrium in that paradoxical dynamic is what keeps the political motor running.