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Comment by jacobolus | Hacker News Reader

If some aristocrat’s great-great-...-grandpa was a thug soldier in a conquering army or the screwup third son of some foreign noble who the king owed a favor to or possibly a merchant who made a fortune in the slave trade and then married into a noble family (or whatever, pick your favorite backstory), and the aristocrat’s tenant farmers’ ancestors were the local people pressed into involuntary labor who then literally built everything nearby with their own hands over the subsequent few centuries, why should the family whose main claim to fame is aggressive use of force sometime in the distant past continue to own everything, while the ones doing all the work own nothing?

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This is exactly why the US [used to] have a meaningful inheritance tax.

Without such a tax, compound earnings on investments implies that over time, a very small fraction of the population will control the vast majority of all economic resources.

At the Federal level there is a progressive estate tax up to 40%.

I don’t believe the rates have changed much, but the base amount which is excluded has increase to ~$5.5million per person, $11m per married couple.

Why do you say “used to”? This is not nearly so much of an exclusion amount as to approach an effect where “a very small fraction of the population will control the vast majority of all economic resources.”

Why should they continue to own it? So that some other account can't write a four-line paragraph and tell us to take what you own. We protect other peoples' property rights in order to secure our own.

I agree, but I guess maybe the issue is that too many people have started to feel like they have nothing to lose regardless.

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.

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?

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.

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.

> So you’re talking 0.00008%

The ownership is probably a power law. If you did a simple "averaging" division, that makes no sense.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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).

> 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The people digging in my grand parent's garden to find&take their hidden winter children clothes and provisions were 100% Romanians, locals from that tiny village, previous lazy losers freshly empowered into dedicated tools of the communist regime.

But the collectivisation was the exact opposite: it took land from everybody and gave it to the state.

My point was, land/wealth redistribution, can and often is a good thing, it's not a sacrilege that aytomatically ends in dissaster as some die-hards make it to be.

Everybody?! The communist propaganda was very careful to underline that they only took from those "who had too much" to give to those "who needed" for the "betterment of everybody".

Too bad if you (dirt poor and uneducated) went to fight in WW1 to get some land and then spent the years after WW1 working that land like crazy to buy more land because you believed that gave your children a better chance in life than you had.

Because that's what happens when you don't have principles (like "private property is sacred") and you replace them instead with nebulous beliefs that sometimes it's OK to steal from others, as long as they have more than you do and you get some of that booty.

That was just propaganda. They took priate property away from everyone that had something. Even if you had two cows, they took that away and made it state property. The process is quite nicely illustrated in the Morometii sequel that came out last year:

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt9203168/

The oligarchs are generally former Communist managers who cashed out as the Soviet Union crashed. So really not that different from William the Conqueror etc.

Land reforms and redistribution never work. It just disrupts the current social order, pisses off people from which the land has been taken, pisses off people who didn't get as much as their neighbor and eventually, roughly within 50 years, leads to similar social structure as before the reform. Only with different social class becoming the owners. The old aristocracy gets displaced by new oligarchic aristocracy. This has happened all over Eastern Europe.

The actual solution is capturing of the rent as the land value increases. The increase on land value is due to society contributing, but the beneficiary is the landlord sitting on it. Tax the consumer, not the producer of the value. Tax land, not labor and business.

The aristocratic power law society has to be broken in order to fix the system. Bolsheviks didn't understand this. Or they did and they organized the coup just to become the new bosses.

Without this understanding our society will still be very primitive and suffer from revolutions and aristocracy cycles. At least in ancient times they understood basic ethics in terms of ethics of ownership and how destructive debt was on a society. It seems like today we are blessed with all these new technologies but live more and more in some medieval dark age dystopia.

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.

> 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.

> We protect other peoples' property rights in order to secure our own.

And from there follows a simple equation - when the distribution of benefit from recognizing existing property rights is too skewed in favor of the few, the gains to be had by the rest from refusing to recognize those rights anymore exceed the risks of not being able to secure your own.

When elites forget about this equation for too long, revolutions happen.

Oh, I agree. And the rich should remember it, and start acting accordingly.

It's not the 'rich'. It is the rentiers.

Rich can be rich because of great societal or technological improvements as well as somebody stealing legally or illegally from others.

Rentiers can be both very rich or not so much, but always at the expense of other people.

Property rights beyond "what you can defend is yours" are a purely human invention; there's nothing innate to the world that says that the property rights regime that exists now is the right one.

There are other ways you could approach it that would distribute ownership and political power in a more egalitarian way, and as ownership (and political power) become increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few, more and more people will realize that "we protect others' property rights to secure our own" is not meaningful. There's nothing of our own to secure, and never will be in a significant way.

This sort of refiguring of property rights can happen incrementally and peacefully (through tweaking taxes, etc), or suddenly (revolution). We've seen both lots of times in history.

Where we go next is the question; but ending the discussion the way you wanted to isn't all that practical or interesting.

Look, if you want an inheritance tax, I don't object, even if it's 50%. (I might at 90%, though. And if you're going to rely on an inheritance tax, you also probably have to tax trusts...)

I just object to the "they have to much, so we should take it from them" rhetoric, on the principle that, once they're done taking what the rich have, then they're going to decide that those who have the most at that time are now the rich, and the process will continue. And it won't stop until they decide that I'm the rich, and they should take what I have. In the process, they'll destroy the economy of the country. I really would prefer that that particular genie stays in the bottle...

> ...once they're done taking what the rich have, then they're going to decide that those who have the most at that time are now the rich, and the process will continue. And it won't stop until they decide that I'm the rich...

Isn’t this just the slippery slope fallacy?

That doesn’t mean it’s wrong. http://www.fallacyfiles.org/slipslop.html

Doesn’t mean it’s right either. Taken from the link you cited:

> One reason why I am skeptical has to do with the difficulty of the causal reasoning needed to establish that a slope really is slippery; most slippery slope arguments make little or no attempt to do this hard work. Moreover, it is difficult even in retrospect to tell whether a slippery slope mechanism has actually been at work.

I see no attempt on the part of the commenter I replied to, to make this kind of effort. And to save them the effort of doing so- even if they had established the presence of a slippery slope, they’d still need to prove it was the causal agent of the consequences they described.

Short of evidence to prove in advance that action A will lead to consequence B, this comes across as scaremongering.

The flaw here is talking about the 'rich'. You can divide rich into absentee landlords collecting hight rents and stifling the economy down and the actual rich who became so through entrepreneurship or other positive impact activities.

The UK's landowners have already destroyed the economy of the country. The country has food banks, literal starvation, and barely functional health, education, and transport systems. Industry has been almost completely sold off, and services are following in due course.

Overt this period the landowners have accumulated more personal wealth than at any time since the Enclosures.

Your point is naive first-order thinking about a third-order problem. "If we let people take billionaire stuff they may take my stuff" is nonsense.

What actually happens in redistributive economies is high taxation leads to high stability combined with high opportunity - not the false rhetoric of opportunity hiding a reality of very poor social mobility, which is what the US has, but genuine social mobility and business opportunity.

Huge inequalities are actually more like to result in revolution and war than stable economies where wealth is more evenly distributed.

Beyond a certain point massive inequalities are inherently politically unstable and almost guaranteed to result in a seismic social dislocation.

This isn't even a moral point - it's simply empirical.

I don't recognise your characterisation of the country. I agree with your broader point.

Labour rhetoric. The UK isn't "barely functional", that's a ludicrous communist fantasy that can be traced back right to Marx, who tried to convince his readers of the dire near apocalyptic state of England by committing various kinds of fraud - like making up quotes and attributing them to the PM, or relying on obsolete government reports into factory conditions. Those conditions had long since been fixed by the government's factory acts, but Marx couldn't mention that without undermining his central thesis that democratic capitalism was in a death spiral and couldn't improve the workers conditions, so he pretended he was citing contemporary documents.

Nor have "landowners already destroyed the economy of the country". The UK economy is the fastest growing in Europe right now (of the rich nations), unemployment is at record lows despite a long term massive influx of immigrants: its economy is literally the opposite of destroyed. You're lying about the reality of the UK, whilst criticising others for being naive.

Shooting down your trad-Marx rhetoric with economic facts is easy so I'd like to focus primarily on this oft-cited belief:

Beyond a certain point massive inequalities are inherently politically unstable and almost guaranteed to result in a seismic social dislocation. This isn't even a moral point - it's simply empirical.

But it is a moral point. The people who perform "seismic social dislocation" in response to (perceived or actual) economic inequality have a long history of performing that dislocation by shooting peaceful people, stealing all their stuff, building forced labour camps, liquidating all their political opposition and then turning their countries into hellholes. The communists who did all these things absolutely deserve moral condemnation and their acts cannot simply be whitewashed away as some sort of mechanical inevitability, no more than someone could excuse the Nazis as some sort of mechanical inevitability given the inequalities imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versaille.

Compare the fate of every country where your views have gained critical mass vs America. The latter is one of the world's most successful countries, if not the most. The others are all slowly recovery from absolute poverty, and recovering only because they finally turned their back on your Corbynite views.

> Those conditions had long since been fixed by the government's factory acts, but Marx couldn't mention that without undermining his central thesis that democratic capitalism was in a death spiral and couldn't improve the workers conditions, so he pretended he was citing contemporary documents

I've heard most of the anti-Marx stories - some invented, some just rumor, a few true. Never heard this one before. Not sure what one of these jibes you are referring to.

Marx traced the history of capitalism in England. Actually in his studies he showed how working conditions had gotten better in some respects. He was writing a history, so of course he referred to "obsolete...long since reports".

You are correct that he predicted capitalism was in a death spiral. Just as he had observed feudalism in a death spiral, and knew about the Roman slave latifundia economy's death spiral before that.

Corporate America going to the taxpayer to bail out "too big to fail" deregulated banks is precisely the kind of thing Marx predicted. Marx said eventually that would lead to the end of capitalism.

Who knows, the amount of carbon poured into the atmosphere increases every year, perhaps capitalism and humanity will both end at the same time before Marx's visions could be realized.

I think the sequence of events you're proposing is implausible, on the order of likelihood of a zombie apocalypse or the apes rising up to overthrow mankind.

"If we decide that billionaires represent a policy failure that has allowed a few to concentrate wealth and power and society collectively wrests some of that back from those with such a disproportionate power and wealth, then that means eventually 'they' will come after my inconsequentially meager possessions."

I don't see it.

I saw an interesting documentary recently about the British Royal art collection, and it included the interesting quote: "At the root of every great fortune is a crime".

The original British Royal art collection was confiscated in 1649 by Cromwell and it's putative owner was put to death! Almost all of it was sold off, with some parts later returned after the restoration and then glorious revolution (which was more or less a coup). The subsequent collection was built up significantly by the Hanoverian's.

I expect that the crime being referred to was the execution of Charles 1st?

In the documentary they were examining a famous piece from the collection depicting Ceasar's conquest of Gaul (France), which, according to the documentary, was effectively a genocide.

A quote attributed to Honoré de Balzac, but when I went to use it a few years ago I wanted a citation and found that his actual words were neither so pithy nor so broadly implicative:

"Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu’il a été proprement fait."

The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a forgotten crime, because it was properly/cleanly done," is my fairly literal translation, but I am not really fluent enough to capture subtleties.

Ignoring the fact that a lot of the land has changed hands since then (the issue is concentration not identity of owners...a dangerous conflation): are you saying that a morality test should be applied to the family tree of all property purchasers?

I am sure this is attractive to you because you are a member of the "virtuous class" no doubt, but have you checked your family tree? How far back? What genetic crimes prohibit property ownership? Class traitor? Rightist? Capitalist Roader? Perhaps religion?

And why do these people still own land? Presumably you aren't personally being pressed into involuntary labour, so why do you as someone who is doing "all the work" still have nothing? These inbred landowners are presumably so feckless they would take anything (certainly, lots of these estates go for sale every year).

If you go far enough back in my family tree of European peasants, I’m sure there are plenty of bastard children of feudal lords in there. Not to mention thieves, killers, psychopaths, abusers, and so on. Likewise, I’m sure there are plenty of aristocrats (both historically and today) who are lovely people who treat their servants pleasantly and pay them above market wages, and so on.

That’s not the point. The point is that a small group today shouldn’t be the inheritors of the entire society’s wealth. We shouldn’t be judging people today based on the actions of distant ancestors. And the way to avoid that judgement is for the majority of absurdly wealthy people’s property to devolve to the state when they die.

Okay, that isn't the point...but that is what you said: "why should the family whose main claim to fame is aggressive use of force"...how else is this supposed to be interpreted? Because of someone's ancestors, this group shouldn't own property. If you want to make a different point, then make it.

And it isn't random. You can acquire this property if you want. But be aware, you seem to be expecting to acquire the "entire society's wealth"...most of this land isn't that valuable and that land that is requires work (which is why it is valuable).

Again, I don't understand what your point is here beyond anger that someone else has something you want?

EDIT: Are you actually familiar with the population distribution and density in Scotland? A good chunk of this land is just agriculture and rough grass that has few economic uses. This isn't land that anyone wants to live on. The main concern of the govt, as I understand it, is to encourage forestry (which will mean more large owners, not less).

In the western US, most land is owned by the federal government, which on the whole does a pretty decent job of forest management.

Why should large landholdings beyond individuals’ management abilities be left to particular families?

Maybe that's why English settlers went to the US in the first place. The UK did not have a French style revolution.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/land-reform/Types-of-reform

> And the way to avoid that judgement is for the majority of absurdly wealthy people’s property to devolve to the state when they die.

That just makes the state the owner of most of the society's wealth--which in practice means the small group of people who control the state own it. How is this better?

Because it’s far easier for someone with a great vision about how to use the state’s wealth for everybody’s benefit to get themselves elected to the governing body than it is for them to get themselves reincarnated as an aristocrat.

Is it though? In the US, I think, it’s far easier for someone to make a billion dollars, and thus be able to buy a bunch of land or whatnot, than it is for a president or major politician to be elected with a clear enough vision to do something.

I base this on the number of new billionaires vs the number of major new political initiatives.

I think it’s quite easy to have a vision, but very difficult to filter those through the will of the people. In the sense that a great vision is very subjective and may not be believed by the large number of people necessary to change things in a constitutional republic.

> someone with a great vision about how to use the state’s wealth for everybody’s benefit

History shows that such people are much, much rarer than people who have a great vision about how to use wealth they have either inherited or built up themselves for everybody's benefit. Or, to put it another way, people with a great vision that will actually work are far more likely to become entrepreneurs than politicians. Bill Gates is eradicating malaria using his own wealth while governments have failed to do so for centuries.

I agree. But it can be made simpler than that. If the owner actually wants his land property to be inherited, why shouldn't he pay for the property protection over his life himself? If he convinced the society that he really is the owner this way, I don't think the society would have found this private land property or inheritancee unethical.

What they find disturbing though is that they as a society have to pay for all these property related services like internal protection (police, courts, law system) like external protection (army) and give these to the sitting and do-nothing landlords for free. While paying for them from their pocket through income taxes and receiving nothing back.. Actually the landlords are then so kind as to increase their home rents as a Thank you.

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