5 ms·

Large inheritances are inherently unjust. Citizens should not be accumulating dynastic aristocratic fortunes. Small groups of people should not – based on accid

Large inheritances are inherently unjust. Citizens should not be accumulating dynastic aristocratic fortunes. Small groups of people should not – based on accidents of history – end up inheriting the accumulated wealth of the whole society. This is not about opposition to private property. I’m fine if people own a house, or a family farm, or a small business, or even a controlling stake in a large business they built from nothing. (Though it would be great if at that point the public had transparency into their self-serving political activities.) But passing billions (and the derived political power) down to descendants several generations removed who did nothing themselves to deserve it is ultimately a recipe for a deeply broken society. It creates perverse incentives away from long-term thinking towards large-scale fraud and abuse, and entrenches the political influence of an aristocratic class whose primary goal is to maintain their fortunes rather than contribute to the society.

onetimeusename 8y ago
Why are they unjust? I don't see how wealth transferring from one person to another is the same as "inheriting the accumulated wealth of the whole society". Did the heirs also steal everyone else's things when the wealth was passed on? How does that happen?
- codyb 8y ago
  If inequality is very high (say 1% own 40% of the resources), and a child inherits almost a percentage of the _entire society’s wealth_ just by birth then that select group of inheritances is receiving incredible portions of the accumulated wealth of society by birth becomes an aristocracy. Thats how I read GP.
  - FakeComments 8y ago
    Yes, but that’s not being realistic. 1% of 1 million people is 10,000 people, who will be roughly half kids and young adults — the heirs. So you’re talking 0.00008% of the wealth being passed down, roughly. That’s still pretty unequal in a society with a lot of people, but I’m also not sure smashing any granule of accumulated wealth leads to a vibrant society — the inter generational transfer of structures is essential for culture. Capitalism is fundamentally just highly mobile aristocracy, though — and that may be the best we can do.
    - robocat 8y ago
      > So you’re talking 0.00008% The ownership is probably a power law. If you did a simple "averaging" division, that makes no sense.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
  - onetimeusename 8y ago
    Yes that's true, but the actual percentage of ownership hasn't changed, it stays the same. But the bigger issue is that the economy is not really a finite thing. Owning a certain amount of land, maybe by inheritance is not the same as owning a never changing percentage of all the resources. A good counter example might be something like inheriting shares of Google, or Amazon. Those people might never have owned any significant percentage of land but that did not stop them from owning something else that is more valuable than the land. So the resources change over time and I don't really see why land ownership is being used as a proxy for everything. Now, also, you may have not been making that point yourself but just clarifying. I just want to talk people down from the land confiscation movement because it seems destructive and pointless.
- raducu 8y ago
  In a perfect world where the rich pay proper taxes, monopolies and corruption does not exist, it would not be unjust. It used to be a principle in ancient times that one is not entitled to more land than one can deffend.
  - onetimeusename 8y ago
    So there are a couple issues here. Taxes(on the rich), economic opportunity(from monopolies and corruption), land ownership, and implicitly a notion of fairness and these all become merged in to one issue but I don't think they really are all the same at all. Land ownership seems like a much more mundane part of the economy actually but it is being equated with the entire economy. So what does land ownership have to do with monopolies, corruption, and the rich paying proper taxes? What are proper taxes for the rich to pay? To me the land ownership issue is being used as a wedge to reinforce a different idea that a tiny percentage of people have economically disenfranchised everyone else. I really don't think land ownership should be equated with that however. At this point, the argument is very different. It's gone from why we should confiscate people's land to what tax rates should be, or who the "rich" are, or why real estate prices are what they are. To me the land confiscation case seems like scapegoating of landowners for things like real estate prices or economic inequality.
AnimalMuppet 8y ago
> Large inheritances are inherently unjust. Really? I'd say that taking peoples' stuff in the name of social justice is inherently unjust. > But passing billions (and the derived political power) down to descendants several generations removed who did nothing themselves to deserve it is ultimately a recipe for a deeply broken society. I actually don't disagree with this. But we're talking about England here, and even if you stop the money, you still have the class structure and the connections, which still lead to political power. But even more, while I agree that the problem is real, I disagree with your solution. "Lets just take it from them, and give it to those who have less" is such a seductive dream, but it destroys societies and economies where it is tried.
- jacobolus 8y ago
  Yes, the accumulated wealth of society is “the people’s” stuff, and it is unjust for the few to take it and hoard it indefinitely.
- reallydude 8y ago
  > I'd say that taking peoples' stuff in the name of social justice is inherently unjust. Saying it's your stuff, is the misnomer. It was found by your because it was someone else's stuff, but there's supposed to be some moral virtue of you receiving it, because you benefited from it during your upbringing. Being offended by a perceived slight in Procedural justice is a matter of circumstance - ie altering the principles you were born under for Distributive justice, even if you don't think it's as equitable based on your experience. From a pragmatic point of view, inheritance causes Capitalism to fall into anarchy in the long term...making it inherently immoral, as a practice. Unless you want to dispense with capitalism, in which case it's still immoral to a lesser degree (lesser evil against a greater evil).
- sumedh 8y ago
  > I'd say that taking peoples' stuff in the name of social justice is inherently unjust. You have people like Buffett, Gates even Andrew Carnegie and many other billionaires saying that their wealth should go back to society instead of their kids, are they all wrong?
petre 8y ago
Lenin took that statement to the next level and caused the Bolshevik Revolution. We all know how that fared. Now the oligarchs de facto own Russia.
- raducu 8y ago
  But that's just one extreme example. In romanian history I know 2 positive examples where land was confiscated and redistributed with positive effects: one by Alexandru Ioan Cuza who confiscated most land owned by church(roughly 25% of the country) and another instance during ww1 when the King decreted every peasant fighting in the war will be alloted land by the state. Nothing bad came from that, the people were already working the land, they just got to take home the fruits of their labor more.
  - petre 8y ago
    It was roughly the same during the French Revolution and giving public land to veterans is a practice since the Roman Empire. But in the USSR during Stalin, colectivised agricultural land amounted to 91%. The blosheviks took land from everyone who owned land, big or small. Add to that other private property such as livestock, means of production. I agree that Cuza's secularisation of monastic estates was a good thing.
  - nickpp 8y ago
    Of course, you are conveniently forgetting a much more recent example of land redistribution from Romanian history: the forced collectivization after the WW2. The effects were predictably horrifying, with families starving while their land was forcibly taken and misused by people more friendly with the new system. Because when the state CAN take everything from you, it's up the "wise statesmen" if the taking is for the good or for the bad of the society. You have no saying it is, but one thing is for sure: it’s bad for you and always good for said statesmen and their tools.
    - petre 8y ago
      That's still the work of the USSR. The communists siezed power in Romania under Russian occupation after WW2. The recipe was similar to what Putin used in Crimeea some years ago but at least there they had some popular support whereas in Romania they used intimidation and massive election fraud.
imtringued 8y ago
It doesn't sound like the inheritance is the problem but the concentrstion of power. A simple and fair solution would be to not allow a single person to inherit more than 50% of the wealth of their parent! Therefore every generation splits the wealth among two or more people which leads to a reduction in wealth concentration.
- sumedh 8y ago
  > A simple and fair solution would be to not allow a single person to inherit more than 50% of the wealth of their parent! Pass that law and nothing would change, the money would go to some offshore bank account which is owned by a secret trust controlled by the kid.

onetimeusename 8y ago

Why are they unjust? I don't see how wealth transferring from one person to another is the same as "inheriting the accumulated wealth of the whole society". Did the heirs also steal everyone else's things when the wealth was passed on? How does that happen?

codyb 8y ago
If inequality is very high (say 1% own 40% of the resources), and a child inherits almost a percentage of the _entire society’s wealth_ just by birth then that select group of inheritances is receiving incredible portions of the accumulated wealth of society by birth becomes an aristocracy. Thats how I read GP.
- FakeComments 8y ago
  Yes, but that’s not being realistic. 1% of 1 million people is 10,000 people, who will be roughly half kids and young adults — the heirs. So you’re talking 0.00008% of the wealth being passed down, roughly. That’s still pretty unequal in a society with a lot of people, but I’m also not sure smashing any granule of accumulated wealth leads to a vibrant society — the inter generational transfer of structures is essential for culture. Capitalism is fundamentally just highly mobile aristocracy, though — and that may be the best we can do.
  - robocat 8y ago
    > So you’re talking 0.00008% The ownership is probably a power law. If you did a simple "averaging" division, that makes no sense.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- onetimeusename 8y ago
  Yes that's true, but the actual percentage of ownership hasn't changed, it stays the same. But the bigger issue is that the economy is not really a finite thing. Owning a certain amount of land, maybe by inheritance is not the same as owning a never changing percentage of all the resources. A good counter example might be something like inheriting shares of Google, or Amazon. Those people might never have owned any significant percentage of land but that did not stop them from owning something else that is more valuable than the land. So the resources change over time and I don't really see why land ownership is being used as a proxy for everything. Now, also, you may have not been making that point yourself but just clarifying. I just want to talk people down from the land confiscation movement because it seems destructive and pointless.
raducu 8y ago
In a perfect world where the rich pay proper taxes, monopolies and corruption does not exist, it would not be unjust. It used to be a principle in ancient times that one is not entitled to more land than one can deffend.
- onetimeusename 8y ago
  So there are a couple issues here. Taxes(on the rich), economic opportunity(from monopolies and corruption), land ownership, and implicitly a notion of fairness and these all become merged in to one issue but I don't think they really are all the same at all. Land ownership seems like a much more mundane part of the economy actually but it is being equated with the entire economy. So what does land ownership have to do with monopolies, corruption, and the rich paying proper taxes? What are proper taxes for the rich to pay? To me the land ownership issue is being used as a wedge to reinforce a different idea that a tiny percentage of people have economically disenfranchised everyone else. I really don't think land ownership should be equated with that however. At this point, the argument is very different. It's gone from why we should confiscate people's land to what tax rates should be, or who the "rich" are, or why real estate prices are what they are. To me the land confiscation case seems like scapegoating of landowners for things like real estate prices or economic inequality.

AnimalMuppet 8y ago

> Large inheritances are inherently unjust. Really? I'd say that taking peoples' stuff in the name of social justice is inherently unjust. > But passing billions (and the derived political power) down to descendants several generations removed who did nothing themselves to deserve it is ultimately a recipe for a deeply broken society. I actually don't disagree with this. But we're talking about England here, and even if you stop the money, you still have the class structure and the connections, which still lead to political power. But even more, while I agree that the problem is real, I disagree with your solution. "Lets just take it from them, and give it to those who have less" is such a seductive dream, but it destroys societies and economies where it is tried.

jacobolus 8y ago
Yes, the accumulated wealth of society is “the people’s” stuff, and it is unjust for the few to take it and hoard it indefinitely.
reallydude 8y ago
> I'd say that taking peoples' stuff in the name of social justice is inherently unjust. Saying it's your stuff, is the misnomer. It was found by your because it was someone else's stuff, but there's supposed to be some moral virtue of you receiving it, because you benefited from it during your upbringing. Being offended by a perceived slight in Procedural justice is a matter of circumstance - ie altering the principles you were born under for Distributive justice, even if you don't think it's as equitable based on your experience. From a pragmatic point of view, inheritance causes Capitalism to fall into anarchy in the long term...making it inherently immoral, as a practice. Unless you want to dispense with capitalism, in which case it's still immoral to a lesser degree (lesser evil against a greater evil).
sumedh 8y ago
> I'd say that taking peoples' stuff in the name of social justice is inherently unjust. You have people like Buffett, Gates even Andrew Carnegie and many other billionaires saying that their wealth should go back to society instead of their kids, are they all wrong?

petre 8y ago

Lenin took that statement to the next level and caused the Bolshevik Revolution. We all know how that fared. Now the oligarchs de facto own Russia.

raducu 8y ago
But that's just one extreme example. In romanian history I know 2 positive examples where land was confiscated and redistributed with positive effects: one by Alexandru Ioan Cuza who confiscated most land owned by church(roughly 25% of the country) and another instance during ww1 when the King decreted every peasant fighting in the war will be alloted land by the state. Nothing bad came from that, the people were already working the land, they just got to take home the fruits of their labor more.
- petre 8y ago
  It was roughly the same during the French Revolution and giving public land to veterans is a practice since the Roman Empire. But in the USSR during Stalin, colectivised agricultural land amounted to 91%. The blosheviks took land from everyone who owned land, big or small. Add to that other private property such as livestock, means of production. I agree that Cuza's secularisation of monastic estates was a good thing.
- nickpp 8y ago
  Of course, you are conveniently forgetting a much more recent example of land redistribution from Romanian history: the forced collectivization after the WW2. The effects were predictably horrifying, with families starving while their land was forcibly taken and misused by people more friendly with the new system. Because when the state CAN take everything from you, it's up the "wise statesmen" if the taking is for the good or for the bad of the society. You have no saying it is, but one thing is for sure: it’s bad for you and always good for said statesmen and their tools.
  - petre 8y ago
    That's still the work of the USSR. The communists siezed power in Romania under Russian occupation after WW2. The recipe was similar to what Putin used in Crimeea some years ago but at least there they had some popular support whereas in Romania they used intimidation and massive election fraud.

imtringued 8y ago

It doesn't sound like the inheritance is the problem but the concentrstion of power. A simple and fair solution would be to not allow a single person to inherit more than 50% of the wealth of their parent! Therefore every generation splits the wealth among two or more people which leads to a reduction in wealth concentration.

sumedh 8y ago
> A simple and fair solution would be to not allow a single person to inherit more than 50% of the wealth of their parent! Pass that law and nothing would change, the money would go to some offshore bank account which is owned by a secret trust controlled by the kid.