77 upvotes, 6 direct replies (showing 6)
View submission: On Rights of Inheritance - why high inheritance taxes are justified
While there certainly are some reasonable arguments that can be made on this subject, this is a terrible one.
At it’s base, it argues that the inheritor doesn’t or should’ve have any special rights to wealth because of birthright. It then completely ignores the reciprocal question - why does the community?
To do a mandatory inheritance tax simply switches the “birthright privilege” to the community instead of the individual. Regardless, someone is going to benefit, through absolutely no doing of their own, due to the hard work an individual put in over the course of their lifetime.
Furthermore, if the individual is not entitled to inherit wealth, why would the “community” be? What community? The local neighbourhood? The city? State? Country? Unless you can defend an argument of tangible boundaries on where this wealth should be spread too, it’s a completely moot point.
The wealth should, if not belong to the individual, really just belong to the entire world, seeing as nobody has a special privilege to inherit wealth.
Furthermore, there’s no practicality at all in the appeals to logic used here. In the real world, there are some very concrete values that can be widely accepted. Top amongst them would be things like “don’t murder”, and having a right to try and make opportunities for your children.
It’s literally what every decent mother and father spend their entire LIVES doing. Immigrants who come here and work shit jobs just in the hope that their kids can go to school, in the hope that their grandkids might be born into better circumstance.
People forget that you don’t actually have a birthright to limitless opportunity. You find yourself in a shitty situation? Well that sucks. What you can do is work your ass off your entire life, have kids, and do your absolute best to try and give them at least a little more opportunity. Young western generations have completely forgot that it’s not all just about you the individual, and that you’re not just entitled to make $100k+ per year because you were born. That sort of opportunity often does take generations to earn.
Comment by Mooks79 at 22/01/2020 at 12:50 UTC
12 upvotes, 2 direct replies
This is an interesting retort.
To play Devil’s Advocate - let’s make a statistical argument.
First let’s assume that the parent was incredibly talented and deserved all their money - mainly just to avoid *those* debates. Further, assume that they have Bezos levels of wealth. It will become clear later why, I hope. Finally, assume that returns to the investment of wealth and opportunity are concave - as in spending $100 extra on the health and education of an impoverished child has a disproportionately large influence compared to spending $100 extra on a wealthy child.
Second we consider the fact that regression to the mean tells us that the rich person’s children and grandchildren (and so on) are going to be more and more average. Therefore, you have increasingly average people inheriting very large amounts of money. Of course the money spreads out with every generation, but that’s why I picked someone with a very large amount first so the next few generations are still inheriting millions.
Now, with the above scenario set up, we can say that preventing a large proportion of that rich person’s wealth from being passed to increasingly average inheritors and, instead, spendings that money on improving health and education for impoverished children, is going to have a disproportionately large return on investment and grow the economy more compared to if it was allowed to stay in the hands of a few average people.
Moreover, with such vast amounts of money going to thousands, maybe millions, of children - you’re statistically more likely to “unearth” the genetic flukes who are going to be super-producers in terms of taking the extra money invested in them and retiring it orders of magnitude over what an average child would return.
The net result of those two factors is that the economy grows more than if the money had been left in the hands of a few average inheritors. And *that* would benefit everyone in the sense that a larger economy allows more spending on education etc etc with more people benefiting and a virtuous circle ensuing.
Of course, that all assumes that the rate at which regression to the mean happens in terms of the abilities of the rich parent is faster than their money redistributes to effectively meaningless extra amounts per child. So the inheritance tax rate should be such to “balance” those factors. (But it also assumes that all rich people are genuinely above average talented - as opposed to just being lucky).
I think that’s a reasonable case for why inheritance tax could be a good thing - in the sense it’s the “right” thing to do because it improves the lives of the most people (including future generations who will dramatically outnumber current generations in a cumulative sense).
Comment by Jarhyn at 22/01/2020 at 13:49 UTC
1 upvotes, 4 direct replies
This is fairly simple to debunk: as inheritors do nothing specifically to inherit, their special lottery by birth to resources is not earned.
As per your own post, you (and by extension those born rich) *do not" have a birthright to limitless opportunity.
There are, in good philosophy, considerations upon what justification one may found their entitlement to rights by which to act. As (until a different paradigm that would allow knowledge may be discovered) the existence of knowledge is anethma to contradiction, these justifications may not be contradictory and still be respected. Therefore that which may be justified to one ethical peer must also be justified to another.
These work in concert to say that which is justified to one is justified to all. If one is justified in having an inheritance, all are justified to that inheritance, for their mere existence.
You are selfishly arguing for things which you did not earn, which others did not have an equal share of. This is trivially selfish, and trivially unethically. But the consequences of this are anything BUT trivial.
Comment by as-well at 22/01/2020 at 12:54 UTC
3 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Your worries are adressed in the introduction:
The intuition that some kind of inheritance should be allowed and protected within a legal system is matched by another powerful intuition, articulated by thinkers such as Rawls, which is that a just society is one in which a person’s prospects, and the resources to which they have access, do not depend on undeserved factors.
That's a bit harder to understand, but those intuitions play an important role in contemporary political philosophy. That's the whole topic of just deserts. Regarding inheritance:
On lists of these factors we would not be surprised to find things such as accidents of birth. Yet it is reasonable to assume that the descendants of the wealthy do enjoy access to certain resources by accident of birth, and that inheritance can skew a social system towards fundamental inequality
So the paper is not super interested in relitigating this, but rather points out that the intuition that passing on your belongings and the intuition that people should "deserve" what they get are in conflict, and further in conflict with other desires and intuitions. Right afterwards, the author considers how passing on wealth through generations may be a bad thing:
Not only may the benefits of inherited wealth be unjust in their own right: they may skew the social conditions under which agents’ relationships with one another play out.
All this would be strong prima facie reasons for a robust inheritance tax, were it not that
the argument for a confiscatory inheritance tax may run up against the idea that a just state would respect individuals’ rights, too. Being able to dispose of property as one sees fit is a plausible part of ownership rights; and if there are certain rights at stake in inheritance, it might be that intuitively undesirable social outcomes are bullets we have to bite in order not to violate them.
The paper is concerned with solving this conundrum. I suggest you give it another read if you are interested.
furthermore, you write that "People forget that you don’t actually have a birthright to limitless opportunity.". That's not the issue here, the issue is whether high inheritances are justified.
Comment by galendiettinger at 22/01/2020 at 18:07 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
The simple answer is that in an egalitarian society, it's always better for everyone to share excessive inheritance over a single individual getting it all.
Wealth begets wealth. The easiest way to make a million dollars is to have 10 million to invest. This means that allowing people to be born rich leads, in practice, to the establishment of a wealthy class that everyone else resents.
Also, resources a society - or community - has access to are limited. Allowing one person, or a few people, to amass huge amounts leaves less available for everyone else, lowering happiness, progress, and eventually leading to resentment and civil unrest.
Comment by [deleted] at 22/01/2020 at 15:41 UTC
0 upvotes, 3 direct replies
[deleted]
Comment by [deleted] at 22/01/2020 at 18:19 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
It would depend where the benefactor acquired their money. If they, or their ancestors, acquired it via slavery or oppression of indigenous peoples, then ALL of their money belongs to those slaves or indigenous peoples, and their children should receive no inheritance.