3 ms·

It is natural to pass resources onto your children. You can’t expect people to just see their children as individuals who must go fend for themselves. A strange

by xwdv 6y ago

It is natural to pass resources onto your children. You can’t expect people to just see their children as individuals who must go fend for themselves. A stranger might just regard your children as mere “people”, but a parent see’s their children as extensions of themselves, and have a vested interest in ensuring their happiness and well-being.

tremon 6y ago
You can’t expect people to just see their children as individuals who must go fend for themselves Why not? There's plenty of people arguing for exactly that mechanism when it's not about their own children. A 100% inheritance tax (with no loopholes through business or legal constructs) might force a lot of people to rethink how they vote -- because then, they can't use their wealth to shield their children from how society functions any more.
- at_a_remove 6y ago
  Basic r/K selection. We're a K-selection species: we have a few offspring and we invest our resources in them quite heavily, like most mammals, and the higher the mammal, the bigger the investiture. As such, your suggestion is quite literally against human nature. We're not insects. This is the usual trap for people with Big Ideologies: they assume that we're all these tabula rasa entities onto which anything might be written (and should be).
- xwdv 6y ago
  Because there is a bias that cannot be shaken. Look its easy to not give a shit about other peoples kids. Let other people's dirty nasty misbehaved little shits get nothing free in this world. When it's their own children though, people begin to apply exceptions. And that's why we end up with hereditary based transfers of wealth, rather than say donating all your money to all of society upon death. Your own child that you raised from birth deserves your wealth more than the wretched society (basically other people's kids). If someone else's child was run over and killed in a road, a person may pause to reflect on how sad and unfortunate the event was, but will quickly move on with their life and continue as they were. If their own child though was run over and killed though, they would be shattered, may not even be able to function well for quite some time.
solatic 6y ago
> You can’t expect people to just see their children as individuals who must go fend for themselves. Literally the whole premise on which the plot of Inception rests was to convince the child progeny of wealth to forgo it so as to prove that he could make a name for himself on his own merit and not by riding his father's coattails. There's a very big difference between leaving a child to fend for himself (so to speak) and attempting to help a child develop his own sense of agency, including restricting access to a smaller-than-naturally-limited set of resources.
- xwdv 6y ago
  "Making a name for yourself" is overrated. No one really gives a fuck. And you can still make a name for yourself with any amount of resources anyway, probably even easier to do when you already start with a lot of wealth.

by xwdv 6y ago

tremon 6y ago

You can’t expect people to just see their children as individuals who must go fend for themselves Why not? There's plenty of people arguing for exactly that mechanism when it's not about their own children. A 100% inheritance tax (with no loopholes through business or legal constructs) might force a lot of people to rethink how they vote -- because then, they can't use their wealth to shield their children from how society functions any more.

at_a_remove 6y ago
Basic r/K selection. We're a K-selection species: we have a few offspring and we invest our resources in them quite heavily, like most mammals, and the higher the mammal, the bigger the investiture. As such, your suggestion is quite literally against human nature. We're not insects. This is the usual trap for people with Big Ideologies: they assume that we're all these tabula rasa entities onto which anything might be written (and should be).
xwdv 6y ago
Because there is a bias that cannot be shaken. Look its easy to not give a shit about other peoples kids. Let other people's dirty nasty misbehaved little shits get nothing free in this world. When it's their own children though, people begin to apply exceptions. And that's why we end up with hereditary based transfers of wealth, rather than say donating all your money to all of society upon death. Your own child that you raised from birth deserves your wealth more than the wretched society (basically other people's kids). If someone else's child was run over and killed in a road, a person may pause to reflect on how sad and unfortunate the event was, but will quickly move on with their life and continue as they were. If their own child though was run over and killed though, they would be shattered, may not even be able to function well for quite some time.

solatic 6y ago

> You can’t expect people to just see their children as individuals who must go fend for themselves. Literally the whole premise on which the plot of Inception rests was to convince the child progeny of wealth to forgo it so as to prove that he could make a name for himself on his own merit and not by riding his father's coattails. There's a very big difference between leaving a child to fend for himself (so to speak) and attempting to help a child develop his own sense of agency, including restricting access to a smaller-than-naturally-limited set of resources.

xwdv 6y ago
"Making a name for yourself" is overrated. No one really gives a fuck. And you can still make a name for yourself with any amount of resources anyway, probably even easier to do when you already start with a lot of wealth.