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Comment by ForHackernews | Hacker News Reader

100% inheritance tax on any estate value over $N (inflation indexed), use that money to fund "baby bonds" to give every newborn an investable trust fund.

Nobody should get to be rich because of who their daddy was.

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The question this brings up is this: instead of making it impossible for families to establish themselves for generations, instead encourage families to think and invest long-term, without having their accumulated experience and wisdom be made meaningless by having their resources stolen from them? Encourage people to have all-around healthy, well-raised children who will (if they so choose) carry on the and develop the family project instead of being, in effect, scattered to the winds. Rather than encouraging people to start public corporations (which are, in our current system, designed to be taken out of the hands of those who build and care for them, then eventually parted out), let's find ways to incentivize families to actually invest in their children and the future, instead of simply in building wealth that will be only temporary while hoping that maybe the kids will do fine. Encourage long-term thinking, planning, and investment by taking away the fear that all this work will be taken away or have to be sold off for taxes.

I'm not saying you can't raise your children to be healthy long-term thinkers or whatever strawman nonsense this is. You just couldn't give them 100 million bucks.

> Encourage long-term thinking, planning, and investment by taking away the fear that all this work will be taken away or have to be sold off for taxes.

I see exactly zero evidence that our current practice allowing obscene generational wealth is encouraging sound long-term thinking from our plutocract rulers.

You're blinded from seeing what could be done by the emotional reaction the $ signs are giving you. Look at the adjectives you have chosen — those are the bounds of your thought-space.

Consider the first point: yes, you can make them "healthy long-term thinkers", but without resources — especially when those resources are expropriated for the value of those with far different or far less long-range aims for them — it will only get them so far. I'm suggesting that encouraging long-term thinking on the part of individuals and their families, with part of that encouragement allowing them to build and maintain significant financial reserves and control of businesses, resources, etc., will have far more salutary effects than allowing those resources to be strip-mined for the sake of investors, corporate raiders, and government indulgences. What is currently lacking is an incentive for those who hold great resources to do more than either live large off of them or put them into ridiculous "charities" or "foundations" that end up doing very, very little of use. At least Carnegie built libraries; today's people buying their consciences back tend to purchase an assortment of politicians. Such a great use of resources.

It sounds like your thinking on this issue is confused by your own hatred of government and/or taxation. There would be absolutely nothing preventing wealthy people from building libraries or even putting their names on them.

Anyway, we are not going to agree: you think a handful of hyperwealthy families will be better for humanity in the long term; I think a broadly shared prosperity is better. I believe historical evidence is on my side, but that's a much longer discussion than I'm willing to have here.

Thing is, I don't want it to be a handful of families who benefit from this, but as many as possible. Give people a chance to build and far more than you believe will take advantage of this to make something good. I don't care about "humanity", but about actual people — and I want as many of them to have a chance, and to not simply to be lumped into an undifferentiated mass, as possible.

To be clear: I'm proposing something like "no one can pass on more than $1m (or whatever number) inflation-adjusted dollars to their kids". Realistically, this policy would only affect a tiny fraction of extremely wealthy families. (Reminder for HN readers: the median household net worth is something like ~$70k)

If you say you care about actual people, you should care about giving more of them a chance, and worry less about protecting the non-existent property interests of the dead.

> Nobody should get to be rich because of who their daddy was.

Why? It is non-obvious to me that we should have a collective say in why the rich become rich.

land and natural resources are limited in supply

they're also a big part of how humans fulfil the basic necessities of life

why should this "ownership" gained centuries ago through violence or social rank, be the reason for the average person of today having pay 50% of their wages in tribute to the descendant of that original conqueror/noble ?

Seems obvious to me: The only reason those people are even "rich" is because we've collectively decided not to eat them.

There are more of us than them. Property rights are agreed and enforced by society.

This wouldn't force the rich to move elsewhere?

It would, so you also need capital controls.

A living person should want more people to be educated instead of living in poverty because that will increase their own lifespan. A dead person is not capable of caring where their wealth went.

I could not agree with this more.

It feels like trust fund babies are pretty much everything that the US is not supposed to be about. Whenever I'm in a mood to discuss politics and someone brings up the "death tax" I say something like: "I agree, the world absolutely needs more people like Paris Hilton." (Not to pick on Paris Hilton, but I think that she's a visible example that people resonate with.)

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