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.
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.
Thats how I read GP.
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.
The ownership is probably a power law. If you did a simple "averaging" division, that makes no sense.
It used to be a principle in ancient times that one is not entitled to more land than one can deffend.
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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I agree that Cuza's secularisation of monastic estates was a good thing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Isn’t this just the slippery slope fallacy?
> 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.
"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.