Comment by Shield_Lyger on 22/01/2020 at 15:35 UTC

21 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)

View submission: On Rights of Inheritance - why high inheritance taxes are justified

That ought to remind us that a confiscatory inheritance tax is not a cure-all. It is not enough to eliminate systemic inequality.

• This* is the point that I think bears more scrutiny. Because if eliminating systemic inequality is the goal, then waiting for people to die to confiscate the advantages they've accrued seems pointless. The fundamental driver of systemic inequality is human choice.

If the understanding is that eliminating "undeserved benefits trickling down the generations" results in each and every young adult embarking on life with access to an identical set of opportunities, with no chance of outside assistance, that's a much bigger task than any inheritance tax can tackle. Why allow people to accumulate transferable advantages in the first place, if the point is that transferring them is unfair to the point of immorality?

For me, the problem with things like this is that they're posited in a vacuum. What is the *end* that is being worked towards, and what would that be expected to look like? In this case, what does a "fair" society lacking in "undeserved benefits" to individuals look like in practice? From there, one can decide which means make sense to attain it. I suspect that defining transferable advantages as being freely disposable property is incompatible with the end state desired, and the community confiscating what someone fails to dispose of in life is something of a compromise position; albeit one that I suspect that people would ultimately find unsatisfying.

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Comment by n4r9 at 23/01/2020 at 00:34 UTC

3 upvotes, 1 direct replies

What is the end that is being worked towards, and what would that be expected to look like? In this case, what does a "fair" society lacking in "undeserved benefits" to individuals look like in practice?

I'm not sure I agree. I feel that if you demand a utopian end-goal to be defined before enacting any structural change to society, then no change will ever occur because no one will agree on what the end-goal should be. Better that progress is made sequentially - there is a lot of low-hanging fruit regarding ways in which societies around the world can change in ways that almost everyone will be able to agree are "more fair than before".