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.
