So I as a parent from the fruit of my labors have no right to help my children through life?

Also please note most millionaires in the world are self made, with over 80%. Of the other 20% most made it to millionaire status before receiving an inheritance. Also note the people you most worry about, the ones who get money young, usually plow through it and leave nothing for their children.

The notion that over 80% of millionaires in the world are self made is completely ridiculous. Just because you didn't receive large swathes of money doesn't make you self made. Growing up in a secure environment, where you don't have to worry about having a job while you finish high school, where you don't have to worry about not being able to go to college. Where you don't have to worry much at all about anything aside from your future. With a good education brought by your parents. Hell, just being taught financial literacy.

Unless someone was born into poverty and fought their way out, I don't count them as self made. No doubt these people exist, but it would never be 80%.

That sounds like a classic "no true Scotsman". By poverty, do you mean under the United State poverty threshold over ~$12k/year? Because that's an average middle-class income in much of Eastern Europe. There the poverty threshold is much lower, but would also be considered middle-class in India.

There's also a stronger social safety net in many countries that are poorer than the US, where you certainly don't have to worry about not getting to college (if you have good enough grades) due to family income.

Binary categories such as "self-made" vs "not-self made" fit poorly in the real world and suffer due to each individual having a different threshold of self-madeness. For some people it means not having directly inherited a lump sum, for others it means having made every single cent without outside help.

You're defining "self made" to fit a very narrow definition. All the things you say are true to an extent, but it's not black-and-white. Would you consider Bill Gates self made, considering the magnitude of his achievements, etc?

Not only did he have the advantages that access to a computer in the 70s had, his dad's lawyer helped him with a good contract, and his mom set him up with the chairman of IBM

But the key thing is if he'd failed, he had a cushion to fall back on. Had Microsoft gone the same way as many other computer companies, he could be confident he wouldn't end up on the streets.

But he succeeded... and created something worth many orders of magnitude in value compared to what he started with... I think that still counts as self made.

Being middle class is not a crime and never was.

Wow, it's not unusual to see comments being contradicting each other by switching the side in the distance of one smartphone's screen.

You cannot just state one thing from the side of later comer, and later switch to the side of early comer. That way you are saying 2 things...

I am aware that they are two separate thoughts but they don't, to me, conflict with each other. The main theme of both of them was to not worry about what others get from their parents.

The first was recognizing that that inheritance mostly came from the labors of someone and they have a right to do with their money as they see fit. The second is acknowledging that the person who didn't work for their wealth usually squanders it so don't waste time being jealous of them.

So focus on being the person who creates wealth for themselves and try to educate your children so they will have good money habits later on in life and will squander less of what you leave them.

I want to put this out as a thought experiment. Given that current taxation policy is primarily derived from incomes, and an inheritance is by strict definition an income, then wouldn't it make sense for all incomes to be taxed equally?

I'd be more sympathetic to inheritance if the primary source of taxation was wealth.