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Yeah I'm totally okay with that, a certain point society has to serve its people and not just the abstract view of growth at all costs. Consumption is good for

• conanbatt 9y ago
  > Consumption is good for the economy I doubt hedonist consumption is what Keynes had in mind. > inheritance taxes are necessary to provide equality of opportunity. Lets take this to the extreme: lets say that your father could not provide you with anything but minimum substance until your coming of age (18?). Anything given to you by your parents would be taxed away. This means that you now cannot go to any college that is not provided to you by credit. But you have no assets and no income, so nobody will loan you any money. Plus, you don't have money for rent, so you need to work immediately to pay for your own place. Maybe you feel sympathy for the millions of people that actually live that, but how is forcing everyone to go through that be better for society at large? Or think what it would mean for the state to actually do that: what if you had to build any infrastructure built by a previous generation from scratch, because "its not fair the SF bridge is nicer than the Brookly bridge, its inherited". The emotional answer I have against advocating inheritance tax is that the goal is not to be fair, its to be better. And certainly fair by destruction, by removing everything, is not better.