My opinion:
Whenever editorials like this come up, it always leads back to the age old questions. Such as, "Why do we work so hard?" or "I thought technology was supposed to help us work less!"...
Well, in the USA, we made a major mistake that started decades ago. We started to cave in to all the external world interests that want a piece of our wealth. We also started to tax ourselved into a hole in the ground.
There's nothing wrong with "trust fund babies". Its amazing how many people here on FR despise those with wealth. It SHOULD have been the goal of every American for the last hundred years to obtain independent wealth. That is, an individual's investments and personal business interests generate enough income to keep them going indefinately.
Poblem is, we gave all that up. Now, in this supposed "Land of plenty" all the baby boomers and mid life worker bees are wondering what the point was since they can never get ahead. Well, we created our own problem.
Use your vote to start fixing it. Less taxation, more freedoms, more opportunity for an individual to work hard and actually get to keep and invest the money they make.
That is how you enjoy the fruits of labor. What's the point of working 14 hours a day, if you're dead before you reach a point where you can acutally enjoy your wealth?
That's also a dangerous line of thinking. Because if we ever reach a point where the majority of people say, "Why bother?" Then you know we've reached a socialist or communist state as bad as the USSR used to be.
Yikes, I rambled a bit there, but I think the point was clear.
In fact "the exhausted american" is to a significant degree a statistical illusion. See:
http://truckandbarter.com/mt/archives/000590.html
Money quote: "In total, American men spend 4 hours more per week on Leisure and Personal Care than their Swedish counterpart. For women the corresponding figure is 3.5 hours."
Maybe you love your work, and the emoluments are secondary.
It depends on the person. Some trust fund babies re-earn their wealth by doing something useful with it. Others just live on it without causing problems to the rest of the world. Some sink into public debauchery, burning through their inheritance showing that they think the work to create it meant nothing (think Paris Hilton).
Then there is the worst group, those who see a higher calling in what they call "public service", but confuse public service with public mastery. They hide their money from taxes through various trusts and being very selective in what state family members "reside" in at death to further avoid taxes, but at the same time complain about others getting tax breaks on their own labor. I'm thinking primarily of the Kennedies. Hopefully it will only take two or three more generations to burn through Joe Kennedy's money and they'll just be a family with a famous name but unable to cause trouble, like being a Roosevelt is today.