Wealth isn't destroyed when the wealthy become deceased, reminds Leon A. Danco, Ph.D., as he discusses issues concerning estate planning and the IRS.
If we assume our society will continue to oppose confiscation of property, we can safely assume our success will create an accumulation of material things. It's a fact of economic life.
Wealth, in some senses, is like scrap and waste. Waste disposal is a problem in our society because we generate tons of garbage and trash. Primitive societies don't really do anything that generates enough waste to talk about. But our society does. We face the same kind of problem with wealth - we have to plan on how we're going to dispose of what we have created, good or bad.