Yes, it makes perfect sense. Don't address any of the counterpoints I raised, ignore the implementation details, and just keep repeating that. It sounds like a really great idea.
Artificially creating fairness by eliminating success has no downsides, especially in a competitive anarchic global system. It's gonna feel so good to not have those evil entrepreneurs trying to create too much value in the world to enrich their families. Fairness should be the ultimate end goal for everything, not overall prosperity. Because nature is 100% fair, this totally aligns with reality.
Bad analogy. Money is representative of externalities, of things exchanged by others, like the time they spent working to earn the income, or selling something, and it extends through many levels of transactions in society.
That’s nothing like someone’s good looks, which, by the way, is subjective and has changed over the ages.
Using this logic, having good genes represents an even greater injustice.
As you have said, money is a fuzzy representation of at least some value created via societal transactions.
Genetics, on the other hand, are wholly undeserved, even by the people passing them on. If we aim to champion fairness, I don't see how this cannot be part of the conversation.
Do you actually expect serious responses to your hyperbolically emotional and sarcastic posts? Well, here goes…
The only implementation detail I would change is the flat rate of $20 million. I would peg it to something like GDP per capita or average CoL multiplied by some number of years.
People have come from nothing and gone on to do amazing things. If you can’t get some kind of profit generating company off the ground or at least passive income through wise investing with that kind of windfall, then you quite frankly deserve to work in the proverbial widget factory with the unwashed masses. To wine about that betrays the lack of grit that probably lost you the nest egg on the first place.
The best entrepreneurs are the ones that are interested in learning and building amazing things. The ones in it to hoard wealth saddle the world with bullshit because it’s a bullshit incentive that requires bullshit mechanisms to protect their income stream. Think patent trolls.
If you want to see what fair looks like in nature, look at what every other animal beside humans get when they start life: the risk that around every corner lies a disease, predator, competitor, starvation, grave injury… What presumably sets humans apart and allowed us to thrive is cooperation on larger and larger scales throughout our evolution. Hoarding wealth is antithetical to the very thing that is supposed to make us an exceptional species.
There's a deep irony in both acknowledging that humans thrive on cooperation and building on the work of those that came before us, and yet also wanting to forcibly disrupt that process and centrally re-distribute wealth to less efficient but "fair" means every time someone dies.
"Hoarding wealth" is the entire reason we have capital to invest in new ideas and innovations.
Fairness sounds great of course! Who doesn't like fairness? The problem is, true fairness is neither achievable nor desirable, given the realities of human nature.
When you aim to force it onto the world via centralized authority, it generally results in worse outcomes since it can only be enforced punitively via the stick (instead of the carrot) -- creating even less fair power structures than the ones you aim to disrupt.
The point of my sarcastic posts is to illustrate this fundamental misunderstanding of human nature and how the world actually works. Again, we've tried this a million times, with the receipts to show for the results. It's not good.
Having children inherit the wealth and privilege of their parents is how you get aristocracies and they suck for everyone who isn't an aristocrat which is like 99.9% of the population.
Ironically, aristocracy has more in common with the communist theories in this thread than it does with capitalists giving their kids inheritance. Both communist seizing of assets and aristocratic control of them are about centralized control as opposed to markets which lead to competitive decentralized control.
There’s no market economy on earth with 100% wealth confiscation above any threshold (as being suggested here). Might be wise to infer why that is.
This is a clever play on words, akin to “made with 100% real juice” while 98% is sugar, water, preservative and food dye. Very different framing from “you can inherit e.g. $20 million tax free”. Of course a realistic system would be graduated, not all or nothing around some hard, unchanging limit.
Again, if you want to leave enough to ensure a lifetime of not only survival, but luxury, be my guest. But that is still only in the tens of millions, not hundreds of billions.
A person that didn’t accumulate that wealth likely doesn’t have the experience to manage it. So not only is it being locked away, it will be perverted. “Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.” And that’s before you even consider spoiled brats that get drunk on power like trump or musk.
The idea of such grandiose inheritance seems to be a workaround for “you can’t take it with you.” But your kids are not you. It’s a control fantasy. You can’t prevent all suffering for your children, they will still die alone in their own mind one day.
It’s reasonable to want to minimize that suffering. But there are extremely marginal returns on that once you’re beyond 2 commas of net assets in the current economy. I believe that setting them up for life in such a way actually cripples them, in the shirtsleeves curse way.
> Might be wise to infer why that is.
Part of the reason is that they generate tax revenue from other avenues, like pure wealth taxes, or much higher income tax.
And I doubt you’d be willing to follow all their other examples, like free speech limitations, gun control, immigration, or medical philosophies like euthanasia and abortion. Note that this is not an exhaustive list and is only stated rhetorically, designed to help you realize that you’re comparing apples and oranges.
At the end of the day we do actually need some government services and they need to need paid for as long as we have any semblance of market economy. Staunch libertarians are happy to forego two marshmallows later so long as they can have one now.
We’ve seen that centrally planned communism fails, but that decentralized nodes of aristocracy and oligopoly also fail. I think we’ll eventually see societies try some new things to break out of this dichotomy. It’s not a question of whether or not to distribute, but how.
If money is the representation of the cooperative effort that has come before you, then hoarding wealth is holding human cooperation hostage.
In order for an economy to function, currency needs to, you know, be current. If you lock up current in a capacitor, it’s only potential energy, and it can leach away to nothing. Kinetic energy is what makes things actually happen.
I do agree with you on the dangers of centralized planning. But it’s a necessary evil. Indeed, there could be no wealth to hoard without centralized authority, because it is that authority that gives wealth (in its modern form, fiat currency) its value. Unless you want to go back to warlords, rape, pillage, slavery? Surely the leopards would never eat my face?
At the very least, you need to pay the devil his due in terms of the military that maintain the reality of the nation’s existence and soft power, in order for that fiat currency, economy, and way of life to even function at all. Not to mention all the other agencies that afford our modern quality of life.
That’s not the same as a feudal lord extracting his tribute because we elect the leaders that serve us and place limits on their occupation in the seat of power, as much as it would seem that some people want to do away with that system.
