2 upvotes, 2 direct replies (showing 2)
View submission: On Rights of Inheritance - why high inheritance taxes are justified
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 nslinkns24 at 22/01/2020 at 15:17 UTC
4 upvotes, 0 direct replies
The paper doesn't seem to consider the incentive that inheritance provides for people to take risks and earn money that can be used to help their children. It also doesn't consider how society benefits from these risk takers creating new or innovative services. Overall, there is a philosphy question here, but it needs to be more deeply informed by economics.
Comment by bluePizelStudio at 22/01/2020 at 16:10 UTC
-2 upvotes, 1 direct replies
A central issue here is your first point - that people deserve equal prospects no matter what.
The truth is, they don’t.
Life is unfair. The prospects you’re born into aren’t something you may have a right to, but it’s ridiculous to argue that parents don’t have a right to provide to the best of their ability for their children. We’re literally reproduction machines, and the primary goal of any decent parent is the safety and success of their children. Call on any theoretical philosophical framework of justice you want, but in actual practice (which this article deals with as it is positing theoretical change to legislature), a parents right to protect their child is paramount above all else.
And the other practical issue is that generational wealth is not inherently evil. The model of poverty -> functional wealth -> surplus wealth over a few generations is not a bad one. It gives families something to strive for. And in theory, non-selfish people can and do use their surplus wealth to benefit the impoverished. And it allows people to build up enough personal wealth to not require government handouts (I would draw the line between “poverty” and “functional wealth” as being able live out your final days without requiring social assistance). So there are actually social benefits to it - without generational wealth, it is tough to build up enough personal wealth to not require government assistance.
The evil in the “generational wealth” system is not the system itself, but the moral failings of those who’ve hoarded obscene wealth and do not give back through charity. Remember, while the 1% is a great example of generational wealth failing, virtually everyone else is a developed nation benefits from generational wealth. Literally anyone above the poverty line, and even some below it, have and do benefit in some way from generational wealth.
So generational wealth is not inherently evil, it’s just often corrupted by people.
The flip side is that any taxation and distribution of this wealth relies on government - also, a terrible system that has failed 100% of the time in the past, and is almost always corrupt. Eliminating generational wealth, and having every person start from scratch, will almost certainly create a system that requires government services. This isn’t a bad thing - in fact, there’s a good chance it would create a much more equal system for a time. But it will fail eventually, you can basically be absolutely sure of that. Every single government has fallen.
Basically, the end result is a choice. Either the route of generational wealth, and independent factors for success, or government intervention. Both are problematic in that either will fail if they are run by morally corrupt persons.
It ultimately sort of boils down to a socialist/capitalist argument in practice.