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Comment by barrkel | Hacker News Reader

Money is a claim on future production, and you don't get to transfer that claim over other people's work without caveats, whether it's inheritance tax, limits on gifts, or wealth taxes.

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Of course. I'm not talking about avoiding taxes, or skirting other laws. The issue here is simple privacy for the common law abiding people.

What you own can never be an entirely private matter. It's fundamentally about your relation to everyone else in the world, things you are allowed to do that they aren't.

"work" is doing a lot of work here, especially when talking about generational wealth.

That’s certainly a popular view, but it’s not a given by any means. You will find plenty of people that think giving their children $100 should be possible without any government intervention or taxation. Unless you’re against that as well, we’re talking about arbitrary lines for when the government gets to wet its beak.

There’s an arbitrary line between handshake and battery, yet most people and the law system can see the difference. Claiming there’s no qualitative difference between someone giving $100 dollar to their child as a birthday gift, and inheritance of billion dollars, seems like a weak argument.

Then it should be obvious, no? Is $1 million ok? That’s a small single family home in Palo Alto in disrepair.

So how about $5 mil? Nice larger lot home in Palo Alto that some dying parents bought in 1940. Not even retirement money in the bay but could be middle class retirement in Alaska.

Where is your “obvious” line? Your handshake/battery analogy is shitty because it involves a victim and medical/first responder reports.

We’re talking about setting some line where we feel as a society it’s morally ok to start taking money that has already been taxed strictly based on “that seems excessive” without any logical criteria.

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