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Inheriting is the root cause of all corruption. We can never, ever, have a just society based on the principle of giving our children wealth that they did not e

Inheriting is the root cause of all corruption. We can never, ever, have a just society based on the principle of giving our children wealth that they did not earn nor deserve.

polishdude20 2y ago
It's almost a self fulfilling prophecy. Many people who have owned a house for the last 20 years got in at a lower price compared to their salaries. The only way younger people can get a house now is to inherit their parents wealth. Even if I work my ass off, I won't be able to afford a house the same as my parents did. My only hope is that I inherit their house when they pass.
- James_K 2y ago
  What most people have yet to realise is that home ownership is a quite negative phenomenon. The dual of owning a home is the ability to deny others access to housing. People who are particularly attached to the capitalist system will suggest crazy solutions like a limit on the number of houses per person, but the real solution has always been government ownership of all land. There is no advantage to privately owned land except the ability to horde it and create waste, or rent it out and create inefficiency.
  - dgfitz 2y ago
    > The dual of owning a home is the ability to deny others access to housing. How do you figure? Are we out of land? I would argue we are not, at all.
    - James_K 2y ago
      What is owning a home? It is having the power to legally demand other people leave it. Hence owning a home requires the ability to rent out a home, and to to rent out many homes and drive up the price. Likewise we have much land, but it has not been developed because people own it. In a system of government ownership, they would eventually be outbid on the lease for their land and it would be developed into a larger amount of affordable and higher density housing. Instead people own that land and are able to keep it underdeveloped at the cost to everyone else, then use this leverage to enrich themselves through the increase in house prices. There is no positive argument for the private ownership of land over public ownership.
      - dgfitz 2y ago
        > What is owning a home? It is having the power to legally demand other people leave it. A home is where people feel safe and secure with their family, or by themselves. I reject the premise of your re-definition of owning a home.
        James_K 2y ago
        Well as nice as the sentimental definition you gave is, the legal definition of home ownership revolves around a set of rights granted to you by the government over a plot of land. I could feel safe and secure with my family a t Pizza Hut, but I don't own Pizza Hut.
        dgfitz 2y ago
        The legal definition of marriage is also morose. I don’t intend to observe the goalposts you tried to move.
      - donavanm 2y ago
        Just say “ownership is theft” if thats what your argument reduces to. That said, I think the concepts around georgism and dynamic value based taxes are a bit more interesting and address the “land banking” concerns you inserted.
        James_K 2y ago
        > dynamic value based taxes I hate having to explain this to people, but a tax based on the value of something is called rent. Georgism is a system where the government owns all land and leases it out, but then the call the rent a "tax" to make it more palatable to people who are afraid of public ownership.
        donavanm 2y ago
        Thats a pretty reductive world view. I suppose “the monopoly of force and law implies control, and quote-unquote ownership, by the state.”? So, mission accomplished? The state already compels me to pay annual taxes based on the value of my titled real estate, my car, my income, my foreign assets, etc… I guess Im just renting it all from the state? Mind you Im no John Birch-man here. I actually pay 42% of my income in taxes, and think real property _should_ be taxed more effectively here in AU. But jumping all the way to “ownership is theft, and taxes are double secret ownership” doesnt seem particularly useful.
  - Etheryte 2y ago
    I'll bite, why do you think a limit on how many homes a person can own is a bad thing? Let's clearly separate homes and other real estate here, so shop floors, factories, warehouses, etc are out of the equation. Since you mention inefficiency, how many homes can one person realistically reasonably use?
    - James_K 2y ago
      I think it is better than the current situation but worse than the optimal situation, that is government ownership. What's more, ignoring commercial land ignores that many commercial enterprises would benefit from the proposed solution in the same way people living in houses would, yet there is no mechanism by which you could limit one company to a single building of operation. > how many homes can one person realistically reasonably use? This question is why I consider the solution of a limit on ownership stupid. A person can reasonably use however many houses which they can afford to rent. It isn't up to me to decide what counts as reasonable use. It is simply a question of whether other people would be willing to pay more for some other purpose. Suppose someone wishes to purchase an entire abandoned town and can do so at a relatively low rate due to it being abandoned, I see no reason to deny them them this, yet a limit on home ownership would do precisely that. One should also note that a land tax is another inferior solution to the problem. It is effectively a government lease on land which doesn't allow the rent charged to be determined by market forces. What makes total government ownership of land the most practical solution is that it most closely follows market principals. Usage of land is contingent on productive revenue from that land in excess of the revenue generated from alternative usages. Any other solution will fall short of the optimal allocation of resources which the market provides.
  - gruez 2y ago
    >but the real solution has always been government ownership of all land. They have that in China. How's that working out for them?
    - defrost 2y ago
      Sounds made up .. how do you explain nail houses in China? https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2014/apr/15/china-nail-houses-in-pictures-property-development https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2014/apr/15/china... Maybe take the BS elsewhere?
      - gruez 2y ago
        Please do some research before accusing people of "BS". >In general, rural collectives own agricultural land and the state owns urban land. However, Article 70 of The Property Law allows for ownership of exclusive parts within an apartment building, which endorses the individual ownership of apartments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_law_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_law_in_China >Individuals cannot privately own land in China but may obtain transferrable land-use rights for a number of years for a fee. https://maint.loc.gov/law/help/real-property-law/china-real-property-law.pdf https://maint.loc.gov/law/help/real-property-law/china-real-...
        defrost 2y ago
        Rural collectives own agricultural land is not "government ownership of all land" which you asserted to be true. Moreover, the devil's in the details: ( In China, your maint.loc.gov ) According to the 2007 Property Rights Law, when the term for the right to use land for residential purposes expires, the term will be automatically renewed Which means that residential land use rights persist, as they do in the US, and while mineral rights remain with the state it's not the case that all land ownership in the US comes with mineral rights, these may have been signed awy by prior owners or retained by the State or Federal Government whe first transferred. Both countries are more complicated than you sweepingly make things out to be.
      - donavanm 2y ago
  - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
    Problem is, homes have two functions: a place to live and a wealth preservation vehicle. As a result, many homes are owned by those who have no need to live in that particular place. Bitcoin can substitute some wealth preservation functionality, because it has the same scarcity property as the land, thus improving the housing situation.
    - James_K 2y ago
      Assets which purport to preserve wealth (outside of a bank account) usually end up as some kind of pyramid scheme. This is particularly unfortunate in the case of housing as the victims have no choice but to buy in, and take out increasingly large loans to pay off the previous generation's buy in. Bit coins are quite similar in structure, though they lack the forced buy in, which is why many of them are now attempting to target pensions funds and even lobbying to create official government reserves. (About half of all corporate spending in the last US election was crypto.)
mandmandam 2y ago
> Inheriting is the root cause of all corruption. The way the ultra-wealthy manage to make it entirely taxless; super evil for sure. Even so, it's not really the root - maybe a very large branch of it.
TZubiri 2y ago
What about gifts? Does it follow that gifts are a form of corruption, that exchanges need to be equivalent? Or how would you, for both practical law application as well as moral purposes, distinguish an inheritance, from a gift before death, from a gift in life, from providing shelter in youth and from giving a the gift of life through a part of oneself?
- treis 2y ago
  A gift is one person giving something to another. An inheritance is ultimately someone else's kids giving your kid something.
  - c22 2y ago
    I could only see this statement being accurate in a world where each generation of kids was synchronized into a discrete quanta. The continuous and arbitrary nature of birth and death in the real world makes this viewpoint somewhat incoherent to me.
- donavanm 2y ago
  This isnt abstract, modulo reasonable thresholds Gifts are taxed as income by value in most countries. Inheritance (in the US) _is_ the weird wealth transfer exception.
  - TZubiri 2y ago
    Interesting. Just checked and in argentina there is no federal tax gift, and in some provinces it's just much lower. We also have a wealth tax so that may address the gen wealth issue in another manner. Tax is like that different in every country and hard to compare apples to apples.
    - donavanm 2y ago
      Entirely fair point, and it always makes internet discussions more complicated without innumerable caveats.
ConspiracyFact 2y ago
Nonsense. In order to focus on the supposed injustice of inheritance itself, suppose that someone becomes wealthy through ethical means. If they then turn out to have a mutation that causes them to be immortal, at what point does it become just to simply take their wealth away from them? If your answer is “never”, why is it any different if they gift their wealth to their descendants? Why is gifting wealth wrong?
- the_gipsy 2y ago
  > suppose that someone becomes wealthy through ethical means If you dig deeper and deeper at this point, your argument will eventually come to a halt, before even getting at crazy theoretical mutations.
- Eridrus 2y ago
  The reason to let rich people keep their money is twofold: ethical economic activity is positive sum and rich people have shown an ability to generate these positive spillovers, and letting them keep it gives them an incentive to engage in this economic activity in the first place. The former does not apply to heirs, and the latter only weakly applies.
  - c22 2y ago
    One effect of wealth is the ability to dictate the direction of development over physical assets in the real world. I've come to realize that the personalities of those who are able to amass large amounts of wealth over their lifetime tend to coalesce around a certain mean that results in somewhat predictable development patterns everywhere I go. These patterns, which are concerned with maximum efficiency and return on investment, result in an overwhelming bland, commercial, "sameness" that is taking over the globe. As it turns out, some of the most unique and interesting things I observe in the public sphere are owned by trust fund babies who took a different path to development (or just inefficiently left some ancient thing alone to decay). Either way, personally I appreciate this diversity in ownership of the world around me and this observation has changed the way I view the transfer of wealth through generations.
alexey-salmin 2y ago
The desire to help your offspring is a very deep part of the human nature. Any way to prevent that is inherently inhumane. I don't think such system can last long (and coincidentally they never did).
- FirmwareBurner 2y ago
  Until the children of the have nots outnumber the children of the haves and kill them and take their stuff by force. That was also human nature in the past. That's why we have wealth taxes to even the playing field and encourage children of the have-nots to putting their effort in work and contributing in the system instead of on way to murdering the children of the haves for their stuff. It's sort of protection tax the wealthy have to pay to live in a safe society that benefits them since their wealth comes from the work of the poor.
  - alexey-salmin 2y ago
    I actually agree with that, even though it's not certain wherever the "revolt of have nots" could be held off forever or it's inevitable. However my point is that there's a huge difference between demanding a wealth tax and the "inheriting is the root cause of all corruption" approach. Former is a measure to preserve status quo, latter is a dangerous utopia.
- globular-toast 2y ago
  Yep, and the poor majority who don't benefit from it will fight to protect their right to do it.
  - alexey-salmin 2y ago
    I don't think that's true either. Indirectly everyone benefits because in a good system the total produced wealth is growing and the poor majority sees the improvement of living standards. In a bit more details, the wealth can be created, preserved, redistributed and destroyed (i.e. failed to be preserved). Obsession with fair redistribution harms the creation and preservation of wealth, in the end there's nothing left to distribute. We saw that happen IRL. In my view, creation and preservation of wealth is more important to get right. At least you'll have something to redistribute in the first place. And within that framework, inheritance is a good way to preserve wealth because passing it to the state inevitably destroys part of the value due to bad governance. Inheritance is also a very good incentive to create wealth, I personally wouldn't work 12 hours a day if I didn't have kids to set up in a new country where they have nothing. So while inheritance is only a part of the whole system, I argue that it's not only humane part but a necessary one. Live country-wide experiments seem to confirm this so far.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

Inheriting is the root cause of all corruption. We can never, ever, have a just society based on the principle of giving our children wealth that they did not earn nor deserve.

polishdude20 2y ago

It's almost a self fulfilling prophecy. Many people who have owned a house for the last 20 years got in at a lower price compared to their salaries. The only way younger people can get a house now is to inherit their parents wealth. Even if I work my ass off, I won't be able to afford a house the same as my parents did. My only hope is that I inherit their house when they pass.

James_K 2y ago
What most people have yet to realise is that home ownership is a quite negative phenomenon. The dual of owning a home is the ability to deny others access to housing. People who are particularly attached to the capitalist system will suggest crazy solutions like a limit on the number of houses per person, but the real solution has always been government ownership of all land. There is no advantage to privately owned land except the ability to horde it and create waste, or rent it out and create inefficiency.
- dgfitz 2y ago
  > The dual of owning a home is the ability to deny others access to housing. How do you figure? Are we out of land? I would argue we are not, at all.
  - James_K 2y ago
    What is owning a home? It is having the power to legally demand other people leave it. Hence owning a home requires the ability to rent out a home, and to to rent out many homes and drive up the price. Likewise we have much land, but it has not been developed because people own it. In a system of government ownership, they would eventually be outbid on the lease for their land and it would be developed into a larger amount of affordable and higher density housing. Instead people own that land and are able to keep it underdeveloped at the cost to everyone else, then use this leverage to enrich themselves through the increase in house prices. There is no positive argument for the private ownership of land over public ownership.
    - dgfitz 2y ago
      > What is owning a home? It is having the power to legally demand other people leave it. A home is where people feel safe and secure with their family, or by themselves. I reject the premise of your re-definition of owning a home.
      - James_K 2y ago
        Well as nice as the sentimental definition you gave is, the legal definition of home ownership revolves around a set of rights granted to you by the government over a plot of land. I could feel safe and secure with my family a t Pizza Hut, but I don't own Pizza Hut.
        dgfitz 2y ago
        The legal definition of marriage is also morose. I don’t intend to observe the goalposts you tried to move.
    - donavanm 2y ago
      Just say “ownership is theft” if thats what your argument reduces to. That said, I think the concepts around georgism and dynamic value based taxes are a bit more interesting and address the “land banking” concerns you inserted.
      - James_K 2y ago
        > dynamic value based taxes I hate having to explain this to people, but a tax based on the value of something is called rent. Georgism is a system where the government owns all land and leases it out, but then the call the rent a "tax" to make it more palatable to people who are afraid of public ownership.
        donavanm 2y ago
        Thats a pretty reductive world view. I suppose “the monopoly of force and law implies control, and quote-unquote ownership, by the state.”? So, mission accomplished? The state already compels me to pay annual taxes based on the value of my titled real estate, my car, my income, my foreign assets, etc… I guess Im just renting it all from the state? Mind you Im no John Birch-man here. I actually pay 42% of my income in taxes, and think real property _should_ be taxed more effectively here in AU. But jumping all the way to “ownership is theft, and taxes are double secret ownership” doesnt seem particularly useful.
- Etheryte 2y ago
  I'll bite, why do you think a limit on how many homes a person can own is a bad thing? Let's clearly separate homes and other real estate here, so shop floors, factories, warehouses, etc are out of the equation. Since you mention inefficiency, how many homes can one person realistically reasonably use?
  - James_K 2y ago
    I think it is better than the current situation but worse than the optimal situation, that is government ownership. What's more, ignoring commercial land ignores that many commercial enterprises would benefit from the proposed solution in the same way people living in houses would, yet there is no mechanism by which you could limit one company to a single building of operation. > how many homes can one person realistically reasonably use? This question is why I consider the solution of a limit on ownership stupid. A person can reasonably use however many houses which they can afford to rent. It isn't up to me to decide what counts as reasonable use. It is simply a question of whether other people would be willing to pay more for some other purpose. Suppose someone wishes to purchase an entire abandoned town and can do so at a relatively low rate due to it being abandoned, I see no reason to deny them them this, yet a limit on home ownership would do precisely that. One should also note that a land tax is another inferior solution to the problem. It is effectively a government lease on land which doesn't allow the rent charged to be determined by market forces. What makes total government ownership of land the most practical solution is that it most closely follows market principals. Usage of land is contingent on productive revenue from that land in excess of the revenue generated from alternative usages. Any other solution will fall short of the optimal allocation of resources which the market provides.
- gruez 2y ago
  >but the real solution has always been government ownership of all land. They have that in China. How's that working out for them?
  - defrost 2y ago
    Sounds made up .. how do you explain nail houses in China? https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2014/apr/15/china-nail-houses-in-pictures-property-development https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2014/apr/15/china... Maybe take the BS elsewhere?
    - gruez 2y ago
      Please do some research before accusing people of "BS". >In general, rural collectives own agricultural land and the state owns urban land. However, Article 70 of The Property Law allows for ownership of exclusive parts within an apartment building, which endorses the individual ownership of apartments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_law_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_law_in_China >Individuals cannot privately own land in China but may obtain transferrable land-use rights for a number of years for a fee. https://maint.loc.gov/law/help/real-property-law/china-real-property-law.pdf https://maint.loc.gov/law/help/real-property-law/china-real-...
      - defrost 2y ago
        Rural collectives own agricultural land is not "government ownership of all land" which you asserted to be true. Moreover, the devil's in the details: ( In China, your maint.loc.gov ) According to the 2007 Property Rights Law, when the term for the right to use land for residential purposes expires, the term will be automatically renewed Which means that residential land use rights persist, as they do in the US, and while mineral rights remain with the state it's not the case that all land ownership in the US comes with mineral rights, these may have been signed awy by prior owners or retained by the State or Federal Government whe first transferred. Both countries are more complicated than you sweepingly make things out to be.
    - donavanm 2y ago
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
  Problem is, homes have two functions: a place to live and a wealth preservation vehicle. As a result, many homes are owned by those who have no need to live in that particular place. Bitcoin can substitute some wealth preservation functionality, because it has the same scarcity property as the land, thus improving the housing situation.
  - James_K 2y ago
    Assets which purport to preserve wealth (outside of a bank account) usually end up as some kind of pyramid scheme. This is particularly unfortunate in the case of housing as the victims have no choice but to buy in, and take out increasingly large loans to pay off the previous generation's buy in. Bit coins are quite similar in structure, though they lack the forced buy in, which is why many of them are now attempting to target pensions funds and even lobbying to create official government reserves. (About half of all corporate spending in the last US election was crypto.)

mandmandam 2y ago

> Inheriting is the root cause of all corruption. The way the ultra-wealthy manage to make it entirely taxless; super evil for sure. Even so, it's not really the root - maybe a very large branch of it.

TZubiri 2y ago

What about gifts? Does it follow that gifts are a form of corruption, that exchanges need to be equivalent? Or how would you, for both practical law application as well as moral purposes, distinguish an inheritance, from a gift before death, from a gift in life, from providing shelter in youth and from giving a the gift of life through a part of oneself?

treis 2y ago
A gift is one person giving something to another. An inheritance is ultimately someone else's kids giving your kid something.
- c22 2y ago
  I could only see this statement being accurate in a world where each generation of kids was synchronized into a discrete quanta. The continuous and arbitrary nature of birth and death in the real world makes this viewpoint somewhat incoherent to me.
donavanm 2y ago
This isnt abstract, modulo reasonable thresholds Gifts are taxed as income by value in most countries. Inheritance (in the US) _is_ the weird wealth transfer exception.
- TZubiri 2y ago
  Interesting. Just checked and in argentina there is no federal tax gift, and in some provinces it's just much lower. We also have a wealth tax so that may address the gen wealth issue in another manner. Tax is like that different in every country and hard to compare apples to apples.
  - donavanm 2y ago
    Entirely fair point, and it always makes internet discussions more complicated without innumerable caveats.

ConspiracyFact 2y ago

Nonsense. In order to focus on the supposed injustice of inheritance itself, suppose that someone becomes wealthy through ethical means. If they then turn out to have a mutation that causes them to be immortal, at what point does it become just to simply take their wealth away from them? If your answer is “never”, why is it any different if they gift their wealth to their descendants? Why is gifting wealth wrong?

the_gipsy 2y ago
> suppose that someone becomes wealthy through ethical means If you dig deeper and deeper at this point, your argument will eventually come to a halt, before even getting at crazy theoretical mutations.
Eridrus 2y ago
The reason to let rich people keep their money is twofold: ethical economic activity is positive sum and rich people have shown an ability to generate these positive spillovers, and letting them keep it gives them an incentive to engage in this economic activity in the first place. The former does not apply to heirs, and the latter only weakly applies.
- c22 2y ago
  One effect of wealth is the ability to dictate the direction of development over physical assets in the real world. I've come to realize that the personalities of those who are able to amass large amounts of wealth over their lifetime tend to coalesce around a certain mean that results in somewhat predictable development patterns everywhere I go. These patterns, which are concerned with maximum efficiency and return on investment, result in an overwhelming bland, commercial, "sameness" that is taking over the globe. As it turns out, some of the most unique and interesting things I observe in the public sphere are owned by trust fund babies who took a different path to development (or just inefficiently left some ancient thing alone to decay). Either way, personally I appreciate this diversity in ownership of the world around me and this observation has changed the way I view the transfer of wealth through generations.

alexey-salmin 2y ago

The desire to help your offspring is a very deep part of the human nature. Any way to prevent that is inherently inhumane. I don't think such system can last long (and coincidentally they never did).

FirmwareBurner 2y ago
Until the children of the have nots outnumber the children of the haves and kill them and take their stuff by force. That was also human nature in the past. That's why we have wealth taxes to even the playing field and encourage children of the have-nots to putting their effort in work and contributing in the system instead of on way to murdering the children of the haves for their stuff. It's sort of protection tax the wealthy have to pay to live in a safe society that benefits them since their wealth comes from the work of the poor.
- alexey-salmin 2y ago
  I actually agree with that, even though it's not certain wherever the "revolt of have nots" could be held off forever or it's inevitable. However my point is that there's a huge difference between demanding a wealth tax and the "inheriting is the root cause of all corruption" approach. Former is a measure to preserve status quo, latter is a dangerous utopia.
globular-toast 2y ago
Yep, and the poor majority who don't benefit from it will fight to protect their right to do it.
- alexey-salmin 2y ago
  I don't think that's true either. Indirectly everyone benefits because in a good system the total produced wealth is growing and the poor majority sees the improvement of living standards. In a bit more details, the wealth can be created, preserved, redistributed and destroyed (i.e. failed to be preserved). Obsession with fair redistribution harms the creation and preservation of wealth, in the end there's nothing left to distribute. We saw that happen IRL. In my view, creation and preservation of wealth is more important to get right. At least you'll have something to redistribute in the first place. And within that framework, inheritance is a good way to preserve wealth because passing it to the state inevitably destroys part of the value due to bad governance. Inheritance is also a very good incentive to create wealth, I personally wouldn't work 12 hours a day if I didn't have kids to set up in a new country where they have nothing. So while inheritance is only a part of the whole system, I argue that it's not only humane part but a necessary one. Live country-wide experiments seem to confirm this so far.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]