Comment by danenania | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danenania | Hacker News Reader

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I sort of agree with this in the sense that the estate tax seems like a distraction from the larger and vastly more important challenge of implementing a broadly fair, progressive, and efficient system of taxation.

With a better system, we shouldn't have to introduce one-off taxes for "special events" like death because extreme concentrations of wealth should already be heavily and unavoidably taxed--passing wealth to one's children (or anyone else... in any other country) shouldn't make a difference one way or the other.

Estate taxes stir up an irrelevant debate about the morality of inheritance, and puts the government in the role of deciding this moral question for everyone, when that debate isn't necessary and doesn't really matter.

All that really matters is 1 - how much we need to fund the prerequisites for a modern and decent civilization (which includes things like basic income, healthcare for all, housing for all, education for all, etc., imho), and 2 - what is the most progressive, efficient, and sustainable way to raise this money.

I highly doubt the answer to #2 is an estate tax.

> extreme concentrations of wealth should already be heavily and unavoidably taxed

Unfortunately, government is already the most extreme concentration of wealth in the history of mankind, spending $8 trillion dollars a year in the USA alone, of which $1 trillion (that's 1,000 billionaire fortunes, or bankrupting Jeff Bezos 5x over, every year) goes straight to the military.

But Government is owned by its people, who are effectively shareholders of a corporation.

That's a good analogy, and explains how we ended up with banana republics. They were just hostile takeovers of competing companies in Central America, leveraging our superior military assets. When you phrase it in those terms, Jeff Bezos looks much more like David than Goliath.

And it's why I want government to use its monopoly on violence to stick to keeping the peace, and create an environment where actual companies can compete without violence.

Because when the men with bombs also own the means of production, they do whatever they want, and you get mountains of skulls.

That's a fair perspective, but there are also many essential or mundane aspects of life which don't lend themselves to competition.

Local roads, for example. You can have companies compete for contracts to perform the work, but ultimately the asset needs to be owned by the people, otherwise you inevitably get rent-seeking behaviour—which effectively replaces an elected Government with dozens of smaller unelected ones. Same goes for water, sewerage, and electricity distribution.

Public healthcare service delivery is another example. You can have companies compete for invention, manufacturing and certain boutique services, but for dealing with measles and broken arms, the profit motive does a hilariously poor job. Wealthy people get the absolute best service on this planet; poor people seem to get the most expensive service on this planet. (Yes, that's after factoring in the "cost" paid through taxes.)

Society works best when we all have healthy bodies, clean water and a decent education. Whether we all make good use of these resources is entirely up to the individual—Governments shouldn't mandate equality of outcome—but a functioning society is one where everyone has the opportunity to get a good education and not be a walking disease vector.

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