One big reason is because the whole <i>world</i> runs on prior work.  We have cities full of things built before we were born.  We are only able to do what we do now because of massive amounts of work by millions of people who probably did not foresee what all their efforts would lead to.  Should we be forever obliged to funnel millions of dollars to the estates of the dead because they contributed (like <i>so many others</i>) to the success of today&#x27;s products?<p>The current system unreasonably rewards <i>arbitrary</i> subsets of the total group of people responsible for making useful things.  It also manages to include essentially middlemen in the rewarded set.