As the volume of transactions gets higher and the incentive for finding blocks gets lower (bitcoins per block get divided by 2 every 4 years, and difficulty is rising quickly), isn't there a risk that in the future, fees become the main incentive, increase dramatically in price (and also become unavoidable)? Then doing a bitcoin transaction would be for rich people only. We certainly don't want Bitcoin to become a rich people tool those who can afford the high taxes.
The good thing is that there is no central planning agency for bitcoin.
Fast forward to after last coin has been mined. Some miners may want a high transaction fee and will ignore transactions with a low fee. However no ever miner will. some will accept a lower fee, some an even lower fee. some will accept any fee at all (even 0.000000000000001%) and some will simply accept fees to be a "confirmer of last resort". Why will they do that? Maybe they have a bitcoin business, maybe they are running an exchange, maybe they have a lot of wealth in bitcoin. All those entities are best served by keeping the network functional.
So the amount of transaction fee can only determine how fast a transaction in processed. As long as a single node (even yourself) is willing to process transactions for free (or for very low fee) all transactions will eventually be confirmed.