Inherited Wealth and Conservatism

It seems to me that there's a correlation between conservatism and inherited wealth.  A few examples:  Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, George Soros, etc., made their money on their own, and are all fairly progressive.  The Koch brothers, Richard Scaife, Steve Forbes,  etc., inherited their money, and are very conservative.   Here's what I think is going on:

Rich people who made it on their own understand the factors that gave them the opportunity.  Buffett and Soros in particular started from very little and became wealthy on their own merits.   (Gates had money to start with, but he expanded it by three or four orders of magnitude).  They understand something about risk, spending money to make money, educating yourself and your collaborators, rewarding your collaborators, interdependency, and so forth.  The conservatives know about some of this stuff, but they're afraid of it all.  They're trying to minimize risk, both from external competition like other companies, and internal competition, from workers and unions.

Conservatives seem to see the world as a zero sum game: in order for them to stay on top, others need to be kept down.  Progressives are aware of this effect, but they know that the world is not really a limited place. Rich progressives know that if you give someone else an opportunity, you may make him rich, but you almost always make yourself richer in the process.

Conservatives have always fought the unions with all their might, and for the past 35 years they've been winning.   What they never seem to understand is that the time that the unions had the most power was the time that the economy was strongest.  The middle class has always been the key to America's economic might.  We won World War II and came out in the end stronger, not because Howard Hughes and Henry Kaiser made a lot of money (although they did) but because tens of millions of workers made lots of airplanes and ships, all of which production lines were almost immediately converted to making consumer products at wars end, and the millions of workers had money to pay for them.

Henry Ford was an interesting case, and works as a paradigm of the point I'm trying to make.  When asked why he paid his workers so much, he explained that he wanted them to be able to buy his products.  Talk about taking the long view!  He was also an ardent pacifist, regarding war as a terrible waste.  He was strongly opposed to racism.  He was also opposed to labor unions (regarding them as corrupt), and he seems to have held some anti-semitic views for a time--he later recanted these views very publicly.  By then very rich and suffering from many health issues, he didn't like FDR's New Deal, but when it looked like we were about to go to war against the Nazis, he embraced the cause completely.