The Washington Post recently profiled several young and very wealthy people who felt “guilty” about their wealth. These folks, members of The Resource Generation, had achieved their wealth not by work for earnings or trade but by sheer luck-inheritance. The article focused on their “emotional difficulties” as the “grappled” with their wealth.

About 10% of the wealthiest in America got that way through inheritance and that number is dwindling every year. It seems that oftentimes when wealth is passed from a generation of producers to a generation of non-producers, it vanishes. Imagine that.

Some of the young people profiled by the Post lack a fundamental understanding of both reality and economics. One had a startling lack of a moral compass.

One, Burke Stansbury, inherited $1 million from his grandfather who created the wealth through building businesses and investing in real estate. Stansbury expressed the view that he “resists” the privilege [of wealth] and denies it because of the inequalities that exist in society. He protested against Costco who wanted to build a store in the Mexican city. Apparently the store would involve cutting down trees and, as he put it, “displacing a sacred community.” At meetings, he vents about politics and what he views as an insulated upper-class and he supports increasing estate and capital gains taxes.

Stansbury probably should have stayed enrolled at Georgetown University and taken more classes. Probably should have read How Capitalism Will Save Us: Why Free People and Free Markets Are the Best Answer in Today’s Economy or Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism Is the Solution and Not the Problem

He assumes, incorrectly, that his wealth (or anyone else’s) makes someone else poor. That’s like saying that one’s health make someone else sick.

He also fails to realize that when Costco went to build a store in Mexico that store would’ve created jobs and wealth not only for the employees but for the producers of goods that would’ve been sold in the store. The store also would have raised the quality of life for its customers by providing a place where they could trade the dollars that they earned by work for products that they deemed valuable. Stopping a store for the sake of trees in a poverty-stricken area makes no sense on any level. Finally, he missed the lesson where they taught that nowhere in the history of the world has wealth been created or the plight of people been improved by increasing taxes.

I’ve got a better idea for Stansbury. Take that million dollars you have and create something. Start a business. Risk your capital. Employ people. Create a product or service that someone else values and then let them trade with you. The only formula for creating wealth and eradicating poverty and hunger in the world is to take your gifts and talents and produce something. Then teach others how to take their gifts and talents and produce something.

Then there’s Janelle Treibitz. This part-time waitress told the Post that “I definitely feel like I am at war between my desires instilled in me to eat out at nice restaurants and my better sense and principles” and yet, amazingly, she told the Post reporter that earlier this year she broke her finger and didn’t have insurance. She went to a hospital and got an x-ray and gave the hospital a fake name and walked out. She actually asked this question:

“is that okay that I’m doing that–taking resources because I am refusing to take money from my parents?”

Apparently her struggles with her “better sense and principles” don’t include her proclivity to engage in theft of medical services. (I have an idea for her “fancy restaurants” moral dilemma: pick one she really likes and that would satisfy her desires, make a reservation under a false name, and then skip out when the waiter isn’t looking. There, she can have her cake and steal it too.)

So I guess for Ms. Treibitz the options for dealing with others don’t include being honest, honoring your debts and working to repay them. I’ll make it even simpler: the answer to your question ma’am is that your hospital bill has nothing to do with your parents’ money.

No one should begrudge these individuals and their wealth. They got lucky by birth and their luck doesn’t make any of us unlucky or less wealthy ourselves. (I did notice that none of them had renounced their inheritance or immediately handed it all over to any other entity!) Their refusal to understand both reality and economics, in spite of their immense wealth and opportunity for great universities and private schools, is indeed startling.