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Comment by loxs | Hacker News Reader

There are two reasons this is a very bad idea:

1. Who is going to take it? The government is a very bad guardian. Everyone from the former East Block can attest (me including). This literally happened here after 1944 and we still suffer the consequences. The political class became all-powerful as they controlled all the resources.

2. This will make people a lot less entrepreneurial and as a result - everyone will become a lot poorer. This also happened in my country between 1944 and 1989. Even the Chinese realised this can't and won't work and are currently heading in the opposite direction.

Really, fantasy is a great thing, but you have to think about the consequences. The Western World is heading off a steep cliff with this kind of thinking.

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> The government is a very bad guardian. Everyone from the former East Block can attest (me including).

So, you had a bad government, therefore all governments are bad?

> This will make people a lot less entrepreneurial

Do you think Jeff Bezos would have given up if he was able to become only a multi-millionaire, instead of a billionaire?

- Yeah, I know it wasn't real socialism. You will build the real one.

- The OP says nothing about not allowing Bezos to become billionaire, only confiscating his wealth upon his death. Yeah, I think he would have given up in this case. And I don't only think, I can show it to you repeatedly in socialist countries. There is no "Bezos" there :)

> The government is a very bad guardian. Everyone from the former East Block can attest

“I had an abusive parent” does not imply “In general, parents are bad guardians”.

The same thing for governments.

I'm not saying that there isn't a valid critique of government-as-guardian generally, but any such valid critique is going to be more involved than “governments of the Soviet Bloc were bad, so government is bad”.

Can you show one "non-abusive" government that confiscates people's properties? I fail to see one. And I see many proving the opposite.

If you consider taxes to be a form of property confiscation, then all governments confiscate property, and therefore all governments are abusive. I don't think that's a very convincing argument against taxation.

1. Sell it, finance public services with the revenue, and lower other taxes. You don't have to be socialist and/or critical to market economies to support 100% OP's proposal.

2. I don't think "estate taxes were raised" is all that happened in the East Block.

1. Who is going to do it? Politicians? As it works here with the EU subsidies - 80% of the money goes through the PM's cousin's company and a hefty percentage leaks to offshore banks :)

2. Yeah, after they did that, people didn't want to work any more, so they had to force them :)

I'm not interested in debating someone who thinks raising estate taxes is what ruined the East Block.

Enlighten me, what ruined it?

I guess the incarceration rate would be a good candidate too

Totalitarian rule. Lack of democracy. Lack of freedom of speech. Constant surveillance. Integration of politics into every aspect of life. Economic exploitation by Russia. Intentional undermining of historical cultural identity.

I could on.

So you say that a government which takes (unwillingly) the inheritance of all its citizens can pull it off without a totalitarian approach, suppressing freedom of speech, constant surveillance (to figure out who has what) etc?

I don't buy it :)

Yes, taxing people is not a totalitarian thing.

A more generous response would respond to the original point. If we tax the rural aristocracy (i.e. concentrated land-owners) out of existence, then who will then administer that property? The obvious answer is large-scale agribusiness which achieves mortmain and never dies. Given the history of the unholy alliance between ADM, Monstanto, and the US government, it is fair to ask if that would be an improvement.

Personally, I think unlocking the land from the trust-fund people cosplaying farmers until they can turn it into housing would be a good thing. But there are a lot of moving parts.

If not the aristocrats, then who? Someone will run things, and it isn't always obvious who will do it better.

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