Do the wealthy “deserve” to be wealthy? Do the children of the wealthy deserve to inherit their family’s wealth? The New York Times presents Resource Generation, an organization for people under 35 who feel the shame and guilt of other people’s wealth that will inure to their benefit, and which they believe to be immoral.

This country is rigged in favor of making the very wealthy even wealthier. That’s what Democrats keep saying on the 2020 campaign trail. And it’s what some of the people who have reaped the rewards of this rigged system think too. Abigail Disney, granddaughter of Roy Disney, is one recent high-profile example. On Tuesday, she called out the “naked indecency” of the $65 million in compensation that goes to Disney’s chief executive, Bob Iger. That figure, she noted, is “1,424 times the median pay of a Disney worker.”

Does Bob Iger “deserve” $65 million, or maybe just half that? Would that be enough of a pay cut to make Abigail Disney, whose name connects her to greatness that nothing she has ever done, or will ever do, can achieve?

So what? If Bob Iger can command such obscenely high pay, is he under some moral obligation to forsake it because Roy’s granddaughter feels bad? Oddly, nowhere in the story does the name Sulzberger or Ochs appear, and Punch can still rest easy knowing his empire remains in the hands of his scions.

These “class traitors” reject the “lie of meritocracy,” as Yahya Alazrak, a staff member of the organization, called it, adding that they are “fundamentally challenging this very core belief that our culture in the United States is built on, that people deserve all of the money that they have,” whether it comes from their work or that of their family members. Instead, these beneficiaries of the system want to change it.

The word “deserve” isn’t used by accident, but as a means of undermining the meritocracy argument, and in turn, juxtaposing the undeserved benefits of class and wealth with the virtuous hard-working groundlings denied the same by an immoral system.

Rather than repeat family myths about the individual effort and smarts of their forebears, those from wealthy backgrounds tell “money stories” that highlight the more complicated origins of their families’ assets. If their fortunes came from the direct dispossession of indigenous peoples, enslavement of African-Americans, production of fossil fuels or obvious exploitation of workers, they often express especially acute guilt. As a woman in her early 20s told me of the wealth generated by her family’s global business: “It’s not just that I get money without working. It’s that other people work to make me money and don’t get nearly as much themselves. I find it to be morally repugnant.”

Want to bet the people who work to make this unappreciative spoiled brat money are pretty darned pleased to have their jobs, to earn what they do, to make her money and make money for themselves in the process? Yet, she has the comfort of finding it “morally repugnant” because she can afford to. She doesn’t have to clean toilet bowls to put food on the table that night. Rather than thank her lucky stars, she hates herself for the good fortune of her predecessors.

No one forces an heir to a fortune to not use family wealth for good causes. If the company they inherit is private, they are free to pay their lowest-earning employee an excellent salary. If public, they owe their shareholders, who may not enjoy their good fortune, a fiduciary duty, but are still free to use their own resources in whatever way they choose. Their morality is theirs, and if they find the accumulation of wealth morally repugnant, they are entirely free to disperse it in any way they choose.

But what they are not free to do is to impose their morality upon others. They can implore. They can persuade, but they can’t compel, because their morality isn’t morality, just their personal flavor of it.

Jeff Bezos may make more in a minute than the rest of us make in a year, but he didn’t when he was working out of his garage. Does he deserve it? That’s not the question. He pulled it off, between whatever luck, effort and merit he possesses. Hate him for it all you like, but when he was alone in his garage trying to sell books on this new-fangled thing called the internet, who knew whether he would succeed? There’s nothing immoral about his pulling it off.

Ironically, the new rich will learn what the old guard already knows. In a few generations, the vast fortune will dwindle to manageable size, as children and grandchildren take their slices of their trust funds. Some will squander it. Some may even give it to worthy causes. Some will grow it, but most won’t. Does a fourth generation Rockefeller have billions or, maybe, $10 to $20 million in inherited wealth? Split up a fortune enough ways and it’s not a fortune anymore.

But they will still have unearned access to the best schools, the avenues of power, the access that comes of name, class and, if the underlying social justice cries of the resentfully guilty are correct, race.

In general, these young people don’t believe they are entitled to so much when others have so little. Many describe feeling guilt or shame about their privilege, which often leads them to hide it. One college student, a woman of color, told me that she worried what other campus activists might think of her. “What a fraud, right?” she said. “To be in those spaces and be acting like these are my struggles, when they’re not.”

While the “woman of color,” a euphemism that conceals any meaningful information, may feel that she doesn’t deserve to stand beside activists, perhaps she should ask her parents what they did to enable her to wallow in her shame and guilt. Did her father work two jobs? Did her mother clean toilets? They did this so she wouldn’t have to. Rather than appreciate her parents’ sacrifice for her, she whines about what others will think of her. She’s right. She doesn’t deserve it. Poor little rich girl.