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Comment by dusted | Hacker News Reader

It's amazing how little some people have cared, this was not that they didn't know, they certainly knew, otherwise, it'd not have resorted to hiding the stuff by dumping it into the sea..

It'd not be unreasonable to hunt down those responsible, and make them pay for cleaning it up. Sure, they're probably dead by now, but they probably left a lot of money.

I don't think it's even relevant that "it was not illegal at the time", they knew the stuff was toxic, and they chose to release it into the oceans, just because no one had explicitly made a law banning them from doing so.. Common sense should be the first law.

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"I don't think it's even relevant that it was not legal at the time".

Imagine setting the precedent that the government can unilaterally decide to steal your property based on something your great grandfather did which wasn't even a crime. Do you not see how such a power might be abused in future when you can retroactively punish people for laws where the ink has yet to dry and that they never even committed?

There’s a difference between going after people versus continued businesses, and also randomly criminalizing something versus saying that you had plenty of your own lab data showing that it wasn’t good. They knew this stuff was toxic - that’s why they had to secretly dispose of it at sea rather than just the city dump - so it’s pretty different than, say, suing you because your great-grandfather failed to setup an effective anti-cholera regimen.

It's Environmental Blood money.

Imagine if your grandfather or great grandfather killed people in the Concentration camps and then harvested all the gold and silver from their victims and then left that money to you? You live in wealth from others destroyed lives. This is a same thing but with the ramifications relieved later. People who knowingly dumped toxic sludge into the environment, cashed in a portion of my life so they and their children and grandchildren could live wealthy lives. And yes, it was all legal in both cases too.

I think your argument makes sense. It's a version of the stolen property laws... Even if you didn't know it was stolen, you have no right to keep it.

Corporations live forever. They should have an unlimited Statue of Limitations as well.

That will never stand up in court.

The OP implied that such a law doesn't exist, but there's nothing inherently unconstitutional about a new legislative act to enforce the concept.

> That will never stand up in court.

What's your point or objection to a hypothetical future?

> What's your point or objection to a hypothetical future?

"Equality under the law" is a pretty strong argument. Corporations are legal people, and the law treats all people the same. Setting up classes of people with different laws that apply differently is absolutely not something that would fly.

What do you mean? Even within the category of corporate "people", different types of corporations are regulated differently by the law.

> Corporations are legal people

That is incorrect. Under some contexts and situations, they are treated and considered the same as people. This is not the same thing. IBM isn't sent a ballot to vote, it is not a "legal person".

> Corporations are legal people, and the law treats all people the same.

I've never heard of a corporation going to jail or being given the chair.

Does ex post facto even apply to fining business? Doubtful. It doesn't even apply in civil matters against people.

Ex post facto laws are forbidden by the US constitution.

Only for criminal laws. Ex post facto laws allowing civil suits to be brought would be a different matter.

All the more disincentive to carry out such evil and heinous acts in the first place.

I'm sure the people of Libby, Montana would have an interesting take on this.

The US Constitution explicitly prohibits ex post facto laws (laws after the fact). It isn't even an amendment, but so important the original document prohibited congress from criminalizing past legal behavior.

Nope, and based on your explanation feel more comfortable moving forward with laws like this.

Imagine being able to destroy the environment with impunity. You get rich, and everyone else is forced to live (or die) with the consequences.

Well, you don't have to imagine it, because that's reality.

That's a good point.

Where's the line between knowingingly circumventing the spirit of the law by following the letter.

For example Teflon has been replaced with chemically similar compounds that just aren't Teflon. It'll take decades for the studies to come in, in the mean time every human is being exposed to these chemicals in significant amounts.

Then we have bpa, Neonicotinoids and other pesticides. We have cases where companies knowingly sell talc contaminated with asbestos for decades.

We know these products kill people, we now the companies that make thenknow they are killing people and yet we can't claw back decades of fraudulently acquired profits and revenues?

Imo, we should treat these behaviors like Nazis where everything they touched gets seized, even decades later. If that ruins some lives, well, whose worse off? The injured class or the child who inherited blood money?

Isn't this a regulation failure though? The fact that these chemicals who we don't know the full effects of are let to market is the problem. Preventative measures make more sense than criminalizing things only when we find out there's a problem.

Also, what if the company has been acquired since then, is it still on the hook? What if they've since switched markets entirely? What if the company disbanded and the founders created a new company in the same market? There's no clean way to deal out punishment in a legally unambiguous or overreaching way.

It is 100% a regulation failure. The longer that companies are allowed to pervert government for private gain the louder and more extreme the demands from the disaffected will become.

It's a failure by regulators, but when you lobby for the lax regulations, you don't get to also stick them with the blame.

> Also, what if the company has been acquired since then, is it still on the hook?

It might not be clean, but I do believe it is unambiguous. Yes, the purchaser is still on the hook, and they should check their purchase agreement for the company to see if they can seek restitution from the original owners (assuming the risk of future litigation wasn't disclosed or waived). In this case the company knew they were externalizing a toxic chemical and did it anyways, thus they are liable to the extent the law allows. The original owner is potentially liable for breach of the purchase agreement if that risk wasn't disclosed to the new owner.

> Isn't this a regulation failure though?

Both/And. It's a regulation failure, and the unscrupulous take advantage it.

Liability for damages that you directly benefited from within one or two generations. That it wasn't illegal doesn't necessarily mean it wasn't a tort your estate was liable for, even if harm was only understood later.

Lots of people here so worried about hypothetical future wrongs that they will shrug away existing past wrongs.

We've gotten way too fixated on the theoretical worst case to realize that we're already living in a pretty bad story.

Let's deal with future harms when they happen, but let's deal with existing ones now.

You don't offer any solution, other than "something should be done." Who delivers the punishment for crimes rendered? The government does. By what authority does this government have to execute punishments outside of the law? If the government has authority to execute punishment outside of the law then it becomes judge, jury and executioner. That's not a hypothetical, when there is power, those who wield that power will use it. Is there really any doubt that this would extend beyond just chemical dumping to other things? To me there isn't.

> I don't think it's even relevant that "it was not illegal at the time"

The idea that a government can make something illegal and retroactively punish previous offenders is so colossally bad that in the United States the Founding Fathers wrote a prohibition against it into the Constitution.

It's not an amendment, such as the right to free speech. They wrote it into Article 1.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law.

To add https://www.senate.gov/civics/constitution_item/constitution...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_attainder

The constitution commands the congress to do this "No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed."

The people who wrote the constitution knew how the crown was abusing people. They wrote it specifically to stop that. It is also attached in many cases to state constitutions.

Specifically in this case

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...

Also I am not a lawyer so ....

Perhaps a middle ground can be reached. Where there is some sort of incentive for the inheritors of who did it, to fix it?

On the other hand, I don't think it's unreasonable that the remaining assets of the Montrose Chemical Company should be used to help pay for the salvage and proper disposal of their DDT wastes.

Normally I'd agree. But if you read the article the government already chose to settle this with Montrose Chemical Company. I think it's a very dangerous precedent to be able to go after corporations for things they've already reached a settlement on. I think it was dumb for the government to settle this and they should have waited for more information.

> Normally I'd agree. But if you read the article the government already chose to settle this with Montrose Chemical Company. I think it's a very dangerous precedent to be able to go after corporations for things they've already reached a settlement on. I think it was dumb for the government to settle this and they should have waited for more information.

If the settlement was reached based on incomplete or false information or representations from the company, the government may still have recourse.

So even if the settlement per-se remains in force, a substantial fine or even a new criminal case may still be possible.

Agreed, but we should go after our government for a shitty settlement, not Montrose who legally paid their dues.

It seems unlikely that this would be retroactive. It would probably fall under some pre existing statute like vandalism.

"Causing environmental catastrophe" seems like it should be covered by some kind of law in the last 70 or 80 years since DDT started production. They knew how toxic the substance was and how long-lived it was, there is no guessing game as to whether it was a bad idea, even at the time.

It has more to do with tolerance of callousness and stupidity in previous decades than it has to do with there not being a specific law against dumping specifically DDT into the ocean.

It's nowhere near as clear cut as you make it out.

There are even plenty of examples in the page you link of justifiable ex post facto laws. For example war crimes.

To be honest, because of the devastating long term effects of environmental pollution, and the deaths it has caused, I would quite happily argue that laws applying to it could be ex post facto. Crimes against future generations.

I remember covering this in my philosophy degree and you can argue about it for hours. The example I remember was Nazi collaborators who reported on Jews or resistance fighters or even falsely accused neighbours.

They got people killed, often maliciously, but what they did was perfectly legal at the time. Should they have gotten away with their complicity or should they have ex post facto laws brought against them?

In the time of the US founders, the scale of damage a single human or company could conceivably do for profit was a lot less.

A similar principle is in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, regarding penal offenses.

However, there was always a principle of civil liability of damages caused, so this should still be applicable.

Corporations are not people. They should be liable for the ongoing harm they are doing because of their previous actions.

The problem with your approach, besides the immorality of arbitrary post-hoc rationalization for punishment, is that it is not pragmatic. What's done is done, and you need people to get behind making it better. If you come out and push a policy that in part entails rooting and punishing those responsible (or even descendent of those responsible), you'll have people come out against it just for that reason and the environment will suffer. I would be one of those people, because I would never give that power to the kinds of people who would argue for the arbitrary execution of collective punishments on people today. If given the choice to fix environment/punish wrongdoers or do nothing, I would go with 'do nothing'. It's why 'The Green New Deal' is so terrible because instead of focusing on pragmatic solutions we can all get behind, it suffers from scope creep of socialist and progressive policies that have little to nothing to do with climate change and environment - and therefore I'd rather have none of it.

To circle back on collective punishment - there's a reason why the North, after winning the civil war, has largely chose not to collectively punish the South - in much the same way that other regions which suffered through terrible civil wars where terrible crimes were committed, frequently choose to replace punishment of many of those responsible with something like reconciliation committees, where symbolic gestures are accepted in lieu of prison or capital punishment.

"It's why 'The Green New Deal' is so terrible because instead of focusing on pragmatic solutions we can all get behind..."

What's your agreement threshold for collective action?

"there's a reason why the North, after winning the civil war, has largely chose not to collectively punish the South..."

And how'd that work out?

I'm befuddled by the false choice of "do nothing" and "make them pay".

What about Truth and Reconciliation? Conduct an honest accounting of what happened, what we've learned, and how we're going to fix it.

Think of it as a post mortem. Hopefully not literally.

> What's done is done

Often brought to us by the same people (present company not necessarily included) who previously insisted that "the science isn't settled".

This post is all over the place. It starts with some "let bygones be bygones" even though the cost of environmental outcome are still being paid today. Then it passes through the "something something Socialism!!!!" phase and ends with a comment about TNR committees in a bid to promote the idea that certain types of people and acts should never be punished.

> post-hoc punishment

post-hoc punishment is the only reasonable punishment. The alternative it to punish people before they commit a crime, and that seems immoral at best.

> push a policy

My guess, it was already illegal to poison the environment. They just got caught now.

> those responsible with something like reconciliation committees ... symbolic gestures are accepted in lieu of prison or capital punishment.

Corporations are not people. You can punish a corporation without any of that considerations.

>post-hoc punishment is the only reasonable punishment.

Maybe a little charitable interpretation is warranted?

I clearly meant, post hoc rationalization for the punishment. Typically you punish when AN EXISTING law is broken. In this case, OP is arguing for new punishment based on new laws that were broken in the past.

>My guess, it was already illegal to poison the environment

No. The devil is in the definition of 'poison the environment'. We have coal plants that 'poison the environment'. We have solar panels, that through manufacturing, maintenance and decommissioning, 'poison the environment'.

>Corporations are not people. You can punish a corporation without any of that considerations.

Who owns corporations? This "corporations are not people" is such a cliché. All the rights that corporations have stem from the rights of the owners. Corporations have rights, because the owners have rights.

And who says the corporations are solely responsible? An unincorporated contractor may be responsible as well.

> All the rights that corporations have stem from the rights of the owners. Corporations have rights, because the owners have rights.

This is simply not true. All of the rights that corporations have stem from a public-interest grant by the state. If the rights of corporations came from the owners, we 1) could jail stockholders for the crimes of the corporation, and 2) wouldn't need corporations, because all they are is liability shields.

Corporations aren't actual people, they're statutory people. Little branches of the government.

"All of the rights that corporations have stem from a public-interest grant by the state."

Go on...

"Corporations aren't actual people, they're statutory people. Little branches of the government."

Oh.

I'd be ecstatic if we resumed chartering of corporations. If corporations are "people", we should be able to "unpeople" (terminate) them.

I've long hoped that progressives and libertarians could find common ground over the need to reign in corporations.

I've always found it weird that "freedom from oppression" minded people prefer Big Corp over Big Govt. As you point out, corporations are just more government, but without all that troublesome accountability, transparency, and democratic oversight.

>This is simply not true

That is exactly true.

>All of the rights that corporations have stem from a public-interest grant by the state.

That's right. But that's missing half the equation. If property rights weren't enshrined to corporations, and corporations could be arbitrarily raided by any two-bit socialist politician, nobody would incorporate. And those property rights come from the property rights of the owners because if the owners own the corporations, and if the corporations property rights are violated, then it follows the owners property rights are violated. If I own a corporation, that owns a local business (maybe a grocery store, or a autobody shop), and a looter steals from the store, I, the owner lose. Remember those videos of store owners in tears when looters and rioters destroyed their stores - some (all?) of those business owners are incorporated, so why are they in tears if it's just corporate property that was affected??????

The SCOTUS basically ruled that Corporations are people in the Citizens United case.

If you look at the case, I cannot imagine how SCOTUS could have ruled any other way. The government actually tried to argue that they had to power to censor a book, even if that book had one line that they deemed to be advocating for a candidate [1]. Worse, the FEC standard was arbitrary and capricious. They censored an anti-Hillary documentary put out by a conservative group (Citizens United) but did nothing against Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 (which was expressly put out to advocate against Bush).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC#Argumen...

"During the original oral argument, Deputy Solicitor General Malcolm L. Stewart (representing the FEC) argued that under Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, the government would have the power to ban books if those books contained even one sentence expressly advocating the election or defeat of a candidate and were published or distributed by a corporation or labor union. In response to this line of questioning, Stewart further argued that under Austin the government could ban the digital distribution of political books over the Amazon Kindle or prevent a union from hiring an author to write a political book."

"The alternative it to punish people before they commit a crime, and that seems immoral at best."

Isn't a "attempted X" quite common crime? I.e. attempted murder. I would say it is quite common and moral to punnish people before they commit the crime.

> the immorality of arbitrary post-hoc punishment, is that it is not pragmatic

I don’t see why it needs to be arbitrary, and all punishment occurs post hoc.

>I don’t see why it needs to be arbitrary

It's arbitrary because we're creating a new standard and judging (and punishing) those who did not follow it in the past. And OP is clearly arbitrary in their reasoning. They suggested collective punishment and didn't bother thinking through the implications of how that policy would be implemented and what unintended consequences it would have.

>and all punishment occurs post hoc.

Post hoc rationalization for punishment. The actions taken were legal at the time, and OP argued that that shouldn't stand in the way of punishing those individuals (or their descendants) today.

He didn’t, but suppose my grandfather legally (or even semi-legally) disposed of some DDT and left my father some money. My father later me some money. What’s the legal process to claw some of that money back to pay for the cleanup? Do you or the state have standing to sue me for something I never did, knew nothing about, and can’t reasonably answer to any specifics about?

Have you noticed how we generally do not bear any responsible for the wrongs of our parents? For instance, we are not forced to pay their debts, yet, we're somehow entitled to any riches they may have left behind? Seems asymmetrical to me. I'd say, yeah, I guess if you accepted the money, you should accept at least some of the responsibility for how they were amassed.

> we are not forced to pay their debts, yet, we're somehow entitled to any riches they may have left behind?

Uh. The debts are paid with the riches before any inheritance is passed on. That’s part of the process.

https://www.dummies.com/personal-finance/estate-planning/how...

What I mean is, that if someone creates a net negative, the descendants are not forced to pay it, yet, if they generate a net positive, they are entitled to receive it.

I think that's thinking about it backwards (at least partly).

My children are not entitled to my estate. My wealth is my private property, not theirs; I am free to direct its disposition as (my spouse and) I see fit. That's the essence of private property rights for the net-positive case.

For the net-negative case, it's a matter of practicality. Your personal debts die with you (they are settled as part of the estate settlement process and if the estate runs out of money, some creditors go without).

If you think inter-generational wealth continuity is a problem now, just imagine how much worse it would be if debt were passed along via negative inheritance.

>yet, we're somehow entitled to any riches they may have left behind

The kids of Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are getting a miniscule amount of their fathers' wealth - how is that possible if supposedly they have a right to it?

So you have it all backwards. The descendent are not entitled to the wealth of their parents or ancestors. The right to property (including disbursement through inheritance) is given to those that own it! The dollar I earn, I can do as a please with and has already been taxed.

>The dollar I earn, I can do as a please with and has already been taxed.

Just chiming in for the 'has already been taxed' thing, as it is often brought up in opposition to taxing inheritance. No dollar is ever taxed 'finally', it's a continuous process that involves taxes in most steps. Say you earn a dollar, it gets taxed and 70 cents remain. You go to a store and want to use those 70 cents to buy something. You don't actually get 70 cents worth of product because of sales tax. (See also VAT.)

This is very country-dependent. In a number of European countries, the children are in fact entitled to some minimal share of the wealth of their parents (in France this share is between 50 and 75%, depending on the number of children for example), and what Buffet and Gates are doing would be illegal, as I understand it.

This sounds counter-intuitive. Are children really entitled to a fraction of all the wealth generated by their parents, or are they entitled to a fraction of the estate ? These are very different things.

This, again, varies by country and is complicated. As one example, according to https://www.germancivilprocedure.com/disinheritance-lawsuits... (search for "Even lifetime gifts are relevant for the calculation of the Pflichtteil"):

> German succession law orders that all lifetime gifts made by the testator within a period of ten years prior to their death is added to the value of the estate. Such gifts are thus also basis for calculation of the forced share.

and a provision like that seems like a clear necessity to prevent people from working around the compulsory-share legislation by just giving their money away before dying. And yes, my understanding (which could be totally wrong!) is that this means that there's effectively a clawback provision on gifts in Germany.

So it's neither "fraction of the estate" nor "fraction of total wealth generated" but a compromise "fraction of what the estate would have been if not for certain actions on the part of the parents".

According to https://works.bepress.com/aaron_schwabach/3/download/ there are in fact such clawback provisions in various European countries (as of 2011, but I don't think that much has changed since then) with different details: time periods, whether you can claw back non-fungible goods from someone who purchased them in good faith from the gift recipient, whether children can officially sign away their rights to gifts at the time of the gift so they later cannot invoke the clawback provisions, etc, etc.

Yes, from a US-or-UK common-law point of view this all seems fairly counter-intuitive. ;)

Interesting, thanks.

I would not call 50-75% minimal :) Though I imagine you meant "minimum" - somewhat subtle difference.

The distinction is ... pretty tenuous in many cases (e.g. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/minimal meaning 1). But yes, "minimum" may have been a better choice.

> The kids of Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are getting a miniscule amount of their fathers' wealth

Define "miniscule".

> how is that possible if supposedly they have a right to it?

Tax evasion 101

Both Gates and Buffett have seemed to be following a quote from Buffett in the mid-80s. Warren aims to leave "enough money so that they would feel they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing."

The estate can be sued for debts. There is a time limit on filing claims though and there might be some limits on what they can come after in the sense they might be considered jointly-owned like a house if you're still living there.

This is a great argument for an absurdly high estate tax. You can’t inherit ill-gotten gains if you don’t inherit anything at all!

So we should tax the crap out of everyone's estates on the premise that they probably wronged society and that society will need to pay to un-screw up whatever they did?!? Whatever happened to giving people the benefit of the doubt? Whatever happens to presumption of innocence?

Firstly anyone with a brain is gonna conveniently go broke before they die if you try and pull something like that.

Second I'm struggling to find words for just how fundamentally wrong, unethical and dystopian the assumptions that underlie your comment are. I and a hell of a lot of people don't want to live in a society where assuming malice is the default like that.

> So we should tax the crap out of everyone's estates

Just the wealthy. Estate taxes have (in the USA) applied only to large estates.

> on the premise that they probably wronged society

Some wealth is inherited now, but large gains (extracted from the market) are generally the result of exploitation.

> anyone with a brain is gonna conveniently go broke before they die

That's already happening, they call it The Giving Project.

Is there a precise definition for ‘exploitation’? Is it a function of feelings?

How about we just tax the crap out of everyone's estates so that our democracy doesn't devolve into a feudal oligarchy.

Oops, too late.

We should tax the crap out of everyone’s estates because it’s aligned with the American value of equal opportunity. Do you want to live in a society where everyone has a fair shot? Then you need the estate tax. It’s the great equalizer. We can the funds to improve our schools, roads, and social services so that everyone is a bit better off.

> We should tax the crap out of everyone’s estates because it’s aligned with the American value of equal opportunity. Do you want to live in a society where everyone has a fair shot?

I do not understand this sentiment one bit. To think that we should implement equality by pulling people down to the mean is, frankly, insane. That does nothing to help anyone - its a stance based solely on anger and jealousy. Your policy would literally decrease the average quality of life.

Would you be happy if everyone was destitute? At what point do you realize that actual quality of life matters more than perfect equality?

We achieve equality by bringing people up, not tearing them down. If you think we need more tax money to accomplish that goal, I would argue that we have much more of a budgeting problem than a tax income problem, but I understand the sentiment. But to think that the appropriate tax vehicle is to explicitly destroy lives is not an American ideal.

You can't really make an estate tax work higher than the income or gift tax, since people can just sidestep it by giving the inheritance early.

I think of the gift tax as just the pre-death version of the estate tax. IRS Form 709 and Publication 559 make fairly clear that this is not inadvertent.

Raise the gift tax and income tax as well. High taxes on high earners is a good thing. It spurs investment, flattens the distribution of wealth and income, and spurs spending. Give a millionaire a million dollars and he’ll save it or “invest it”, inflating asset prices even further. Give a thousand people and thousand dollars and most will spend it, helping the economy.

I can't tell if you are being sarcastic.

"It can be tough to prosecute some crimes, so let's just punish everyone without due process!"

So punishment for everyone because someone, somewhere may have done something that decades later was made illegal?

What kind of bizarre sadism is that?

Who does estate tax punish?

The children of the people who managed to live out their days without going broke and becoming a burden on everyone else have less money than if their parents spent it all (presumably some of which would have been on them) and died with debt.

The people who lived out their days without going broke lose because their property rights are being violated. Their property and their dollars that they have already paid taxes on should be theirs to give away as they see fit.

Not being entitled to something no one else is entitled to either is not a punishment, otherwise it's a punishment to me when I can't have your dad's money.

Children aren't even entitled to their parents money in adulthood. Parents have to choose to give it to them either explicitly or by omission.

If that's punishment for the children of the rich, then those children born to parents who are broke must also live a punished life, yes?

If you are against children being punished because of the economics of their parents, then surely you are in support for a strong social safety network for children (universal subsidized/free childcare, including meals, and healthcare), yes?

Which requires taxation or other funding sources.

Which means we must ponder things like: how much of Sam Walton's $100 million inheritance did his children need in order to not be punished by a higher inheritance tax? $5 million each?

The rich will still be rich. They'll come up with complex workarounds. They'll impart the money on their kids while they're still alive.

The people who will be screwed are the middle class people who's only (if any) windfall in life is inheriting part of their parents house and using that to pay off their own mortgage or send their kids to college or whatever (and who's kids will likely inherit a share of the house and continue the cycle).

The US currently exempts $11.5 million per person for estate taxes (IANAL). A family inheriting their parent's estate does not pay taxes on the first $23 million dollars worth of assets. Even then, taxes only apply on amounts greater than that exemption amount, so to have an estate tax take a significant amount of your estate income would require way more than $23 million. With your example its hard to claim the family is "middle class" when they're already homeowners and are inheriting well more than $23 million.

It seems you are making an argument from apathy - since there's nothing we can do about the rich, we shouldn't do anything?

Because we can certainly reduce the number of complex workarounds - which were deliberately introduced to allow the rich to have those workarounds. We can increase the taxation rate for the highest tax bracket, like the 90% it once was. And we can increase the estate tax.

The current federal estate tax has an exemption of $5 million. Just how many middle class families do you think would be unable to send their kids to college if the estate tax rate after the first $5 million was increased? For that matter, how many middle class families would be unable to send their kids to college of the exemption were lowered to $2 million? Because $2 million seems like a lot to me.

Poorer people will receive no windfall in life. Since you want people to have windfall ... how do you want to support poor people? How should the children of the poor go to college or whatever?

Because otherwise what you write sounds like a standard wedge argument - get the middle class to fear for losing what little they have, in order so the rich benefit even more, while the poor get left out.

Higher pay via stronger union rights (repeal Taft-Hartley now!), universal college education. These help give your desired economic windfall for the middle class and my desired windfall for the less well off.

The rich and the children of the rich will still be rich.

Who is a burden on everyone else, and how? I thought the whole point of ... civilization was for people to support each other.

The parent poster stated that people breaking laws is argument for high estate tax. Is this not chosen as a form of punishment? If it had zero punishment effect, why do it? If taking money away was not a form of punishment, why is it used as punishment in so many court cases?

It punishes those who would have had the assets otherwise. Especially when the stated reason is to punish them.

> Is this not chosen as a form of punishment?

It's only punishment if you think there is a natural right to control the disposition of property after death. Otherwise, it's just a argument as to why a purely optional benefit not grounded in rights should not be extended by the state.

Not extending a benefit to which there is no entitlement is not inherently a punishment.

So the state should seize mom and pop shops when mom and pop dies? Then what? Try to sell it? Have it as state run enterprises? Now every generation must completely pull themselves up from zero, and the state seizing all value every time someone dies? Parents die accidentally - too bad for kids, the state seized all value and sent the kids into some state system.

Countries that seize this much property don’t do too well economically.

When the owners of a husband and wife shop die, with no inheritors, then what?

If the children of the mom and pop shop die, and the children are preschool aged, with no other inheritors or people designated to handle the estate, then what?

Effectively no one says that "every generation must completely pull themselves up from zero".

Do you seriously think the children of working/labor class families, living in rental housing, and with no capital, completely pull themselves up from zero?

Since they don't, neither do the children you hypothesis. So what's the point of your argument other than to tug at our heartstrings about those orphans?

Oh, and if the mom and pop shop is bankrupt, or has little capital, and there isn't family or close friends able and willing to take care of the kids, then who will?

Oh, right, "some state system." So if you are so concerned about these children, perhaps we need better orphanages and better support for the foster system.

Now, how do we fund those improvements?

I didn’t say it was a punishment. I said it was a good argument. There’s no legal method of getting back ill-gotten gains from someone who’s dead. But if you can’t pass along your estate, it doesn’t matter.

For the record, I don’t think the state taking away most (or all) of a person's estate after they’ve died is a punishment at all.

Agreed! That Hispanic couple who immigrated to the US, built a small business and want to pass it to their kids, screw them! Tax it all away. Let their kids start over!

Or set a cap? Anything above $5M is taxed at 95% or something. People will still work hard to pass on wealth to their kids, but anything obscene could go back into a social dividend.

Only 0.002% of estates pay the tax every year. The best way to avoid paying the tax is to reduce the wealth of an estate by transferring it to insurance or separate entities like a foundation, limited liability company, family limited partnership, or charitable trust. Most wealthy people start estate planning long before retirement. The ones that end up paying are folks like Prince or the newly wealthy that die young.

> Only 0.002% of estates pay the tax every year.

That is wrong by a factor of ~100. 0.2% of estates in 2017 paid an estate tax. [0]

[0] - https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/ten-facts-you-shou...

All loopholes that can be legislated away with enough political will.

What's the likelihood that the multi-millionaires in the Legislature actually want to tackle this?

https://ballotpedia.org/Net_worth_of_United_States_Senators_...

(That was for 2011; it's a reasonably safe bet that as a group they're no poorer now.)

> All loopholes that can be legislated away with enough political will.

It was political will that created the loopholes in the first place. Getting rid of them unfortunately requires more political will than creating them did. This probably has something to do with loss-aversion.

I'll do you one better. Suppose your forebears made the money illegally.

Most certainly the ill-gotten gains must be clawed back. Are you seriously positing that you should keep illegally obtained money because you yourself didn't know?

Punishment is another story, of course it wasn't your fault, so you won't do the time, but you certainly don't get to be rich off the proceeds of the crime.

ie If I rob a bank and leave the money for my kids, they don't get to keep the money when the feds finally crack the case.

Suing you to the extent of having to pay back whatever your father passed on to you, at least what's left of it would be reasonable, don't you think?

Yes let us just start collective punishment, because we have such a justice boner. Jesus christ, sometimes HN has some wild opinions.

Just to be absolutely clear -- it's not reasonable, and what you're suggesting is literally how North Korea handles crime.

"Oh but you know here it's different" -- you're setting a precedent which, if allowed, would mean your family members could face jail time for crimes YOU commit.

Yes let us just start collective punishment, because we have such a justice boner. Jesus christ, sometimes HN has some wild opinions.

FYI this does happen for companies. It's not that wild. Businesses like Lloyds of London and Greene King are paying slavery reparations today despite the fact that no one in the company had anything directly to do with that part of the business. I guess if you had stock that had been passed down through generations you would indirectly lose out on some money if the share price fell as a result.

If your inheritance was the result of a bank robbery, do you still think it should be untouchable?

You're being very emotional about what seems like a pretty clear case of recovering ill-gotten gains.

Ideally proceeds from a bank robbery would be removed from the estate. From a purely practical standpoint, once the estate is settled, it should stay settled and no one should be forced to answer for the actions of another adult.

This is just a declaration, not an argument. Under what argument (that also doesn't apply to this) would those proceeds be removed from the estate, and when should an estate be "settled."

If somebody sells me a television they burgled from your house, I'd consider the transaction settled once the exchange was made and we'd parted ways. You would probably disagree.

Knowingly buying stolen property is illegal and may result in jail time.

Unknowingly buying stolen property still comes with a risk that if LE ever find it, they can take it away from you without compensating you.

I had my TV stolen and sold to a pawn shop. Detectives found it at local pawn shop and they recovered it for me. These laws exist so that when one is engaged in business, they have to do reasonable due diligence that they are not dealing with stolen or illegal goods.

I'm being emotional for saying we shouldn't punish family members of people who commit crimes? Sounds like you're the one following the emotional argument ("this feels right, because the gains are ill-gotten")

You're not "punishing family members" (there's that appeal to emotion), you're recovering stolen property.

This is not collective punishment. There are already laws where children have to give up inheritance because it was created with illegal activities. There are laws against illegal dumping of dangerous chemicals. It is not too far fetched idea that existing laws can be used to recover some of damages caused by this.

Great. Now imagine the next administration deems that your prior, legitimately gotten gains, are now ill-gotten. Don't see how that could turn into a slippery slope, no sir!

And yes, punishing a family member for a crime perpetrated by another is, by definition, collective punishment.

No-one is talking about putting people in jail, but also (in my opinion), someone shouldn't get to inherit millions of dollars just because their grandfather committed some terrible crime -- inheritance should not be a right, when the original money was acquired illegally.

Whether that punishment is jail time or a fine is secondary. The primary question is, should the decedents be punished for a crime they did not commit?

Moreover, where do you draw the line? Should all the decedents of german families who got their wealth off the back of slave labor by jews also be forced to forfeit their wealth? What about the decedents of families of plantation owners? How do you go about handling that with the institutions provided? What would they be charged with?

Honestly, I'd prefer we, as a society, did tend more in this direction. Where I live (Scotland), most of the country is owned by a small number of families, who inherited it themselves. I'd be happy with a model where this land was, possibly over generations, taken away and redisturbed in some way.

In the US there are plenty of "US vs $1000" cases already.

Though I generally agree with the sentiment that we should do more to claw back ill-gotten gains, civil asset forfeiture is a terrible precedent and should be eliminated, not expanded. The legal theory is that your money (and property) doesn't have the right to due process, since it's not a person. So basically you have to prove that it wasn't involved in a crime. Which just leads to police officers stealing from poor people who haven't been convicted of a crime.

Exactly.

>No-one is talking about putting people in jail, but also (in my opinion)

Every law, no matter how small and well-meaning, has implicit threat of prison behind it. You can't be so naïve as to believe that this enforcement action won't result in prison for some, destroyed lives for others, and because laws and enforcement are man-made, there's also a guarantee that your dragnet will punish some innocents, and let some guilty go (maybe because they can afford great lawyers and/or bribes). And of course, because this would be a very controversial measure, it would be highly politicized.

> Every law, no matter how small and well-meaning, has implicit threat of prison behind it.

If someone doesn't comply with the court, but that would be a crime committed by the child, not the parent.

Why do people keep making this claim?

There are plenty of laws which don't have an implicit threat of prison behind it.

Here's one: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/4/1 . Quoting Wikipedia: "This is a U.S. federal law, but only suggests voluntary customs for handling of the American flag and was never intended to be enforceable. The code uses non-binding language like "should" and "custom" throughout and does not prescribe any penalties for failure to follow the guidelines." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Flag_Code

You're really stretching.

I honestly don't know why I'm so downvoted.

There are laws naming post offices and other objects. There are law recognizing people and bestowing honors on them. There are laws which cancel previous laws.

There are plenty of laws which have no threat of punishment.

But I'll set that objection aside.

Let's go back to CJefferson's comment, to be more concrete. "inheritance should not be a right, when the original money was acquired illegally."

Money (at least as CJefferson refers to) exists because of laws, and the way we think of money exists because of laws. Inheritance is a legal concept, enforced by laws. So the right to inherit millions of dollars by your definition exists because of the implicit threat of prison.

Thus, changing the law as CJefferson describes doesn't necessarily add a new threat of violence - it could change the balance of the existing threat of violence, or even reduce it.

Thus, an argument against changing the law simply because laws carry a threat of punishment is really an argument to maintain the status quo for the existing threats of violence. It is not a strong argument against changing the law, which is what I think you meant it as.

>Jesus christ, sometimes HN has some wild opinions.

I'm not a libertarian myself, but I miss the libertarianism of Silicon Valley and HN. They are still around, but there's a lot more progressives around and there is a very real authoritarian and violent strain that runs through that movement.

> here's a lot more progressives around and there is a very real authoritarian and violent strain that runs through that movement.

Actual facts show that at this moment in time in the U.S. it's white supremacists and related extreme-right ideologies which are producing most domestic terrorism (i.e. actual violence).

https://www.csis.org/analysis/war-comes-home-evolution-domes...

Very curious what the rationale for downvoting this is.

In addition to the link I shared, both the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI have recently reported white-supremacist aligned groups as the major source of violent attacks (aka domestic terrorism) within the U.S. in recent years.

https://raskin.house.gov/media/press-releases/subcommittee-c...

https://www.fbi.gov/news/testimony/confronting-white-suprema...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/06/us/politics/homeland-secu...

https://www.foxnews.com/us/homeland-white-supremacy-lethal-t...

Are people disputing these facts? Or are merely displeased?

Factual information is nonpartisan.

No, I do not. If my grandfather left my father $X, my father left me $Y, at the very most the maximum would have to be the lesser of $X and $Y, decremented by the full cost of answering the lawsuit.

This is problematic from a variety of practical angles, though, not just mathematical ones. It seems like something the forensic accounting lobby would salivate over.

Should I be forced to defend a lawsuit because my great^6 grandfather owned slaves? (As far as I know, none did.) That’s more abhorrent than legally dumping chemicals that today’s common sense says should have been done differently.

Yes.

The only think which could in anyway get close to legality would be to:

- Legally hold a case against whoever did it and win it. (Can even legally have a case against a dead person?) This requires thinks to have been illegal when done.

- Requiring that (likely dead) person to pay a fine based on existing law.

- Arguing that whoever accepted an inheritance did inherit the fine, too.

But as far as I know every point of this list has many legally questionable aspects.

But what you MUST NOT do under any circumstances in a state of law is to not base judgement on law but arbitrary "I feel like this should be done" arguments. This is also why it's of upmost importance to fast adapt laws make them general instead of specific and not put any loop holes in them. Because then you can judge people to some degree even if they do something bad even if that specific think wasn't explicitly forbidden. (E.g. based on a generic law which makes any form of causing environmental damage in a context where it's reasonable to assume it the person should have been aware illegal. Sure you need some threshold, too. Else driving your care is illegal.)

I'm sure you could have a civil case against a dead person's estate. Although, my understanding is it's legally and logistically challenging to reopen an estate after it has been settled.

I don't see how you could have a criminal trail against a dead person in the US, without violating the sixth amendment. It would be impossible to inform the deceased of the charges, etc.

But if you grandfather lost all of $X, your father would not have any of $Y (based entirely on $X being an amount they got from business dealings and $Y being a smaller amount which came from $X).

That strikes me as non-sensical.

My father had his own earning, creating, and saving abilities.

Subtract it from what he would have earned if he had dumped the cash into an index fund, and we may find that his earning, creating and saving abilities were negative. His only profitable skill may have been having a father who dealt in slaves.

No. No I do not think that's reasonable.

Having a period after death for the government to bring charges against the estate seems reasonable. We already have this, but I could see a reasonable person arguing to make it a longer period.

I think it's unreasonable for the same reason getting rid of all statutes of limitations would be unreasonable. At some point, you have to let people stop looking over their shoulder. Society doesn't work very well when you incentivize people to dig up century old dirt on their enemies.

One of the first paragraphs of the article: at the time it was considered dumping the barrels in the deep ocean was sufficient because the vast amount of water would dilute the chemical. The shortcut they took was that they did not go that far into the ocean but instead kept much closer to shore and dumped the barrels there, as well as punctured them when they floated. The discovery that's lamented is the "shortcut dumping ground". This does not fit with your jumped-to conclusions.

> It's amazing how little some people have cared, this was not that they didn't know, they certainly knew, otherwise, it'd not have resorted to hiding the stuff by dumping it into the sea.

> Common sense should be the first law

They weren't hiding anything, the bulk went to government designated dumping sites. Shortcuts were taken, but it was known and accepted that these were being dumped into the ocean. Common sense at the time was "dilution is the solution to pollution".

1. This dumping was litigated in the 60s and happened before this 2. You can’t predict the future 3. This is the efficient market at work, don’t solve any problem until it becomes a social, political or environmental reality you can’t legalese your way around.

The tobacco and sugar industry were/are no different. Makes you wonder what else will be in same bucket in 20 years. Anyone care to hazard a guess?

> Common sense should be the first law.

That's how I thought it was when I was a kid... now I can only wish it was in some instances.

> Common sense should be the first law.

That won't work, we have an entire political party in the United States hell bent on making sure people have no common sense. The GOP are a selfish cancer on civilization.

Adding the latimes.com to my do not click or read mental list. So tired of pop ups or full on blocks just to glance at an article. Yeah I could easily resolve it.. So could the LA Times. Firefox Focus shouldnt need to allow trackers/cookies ... Miss the old days when people posted direct archive links.

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