Hacker News Reader

Comment by throw827474737 | Hacker News Reader

And to others birthright and fairness in one sentence looks really strange ;)

“Birthright” is this concept that can easily be accepted without question as cosmically inherent. But when you examine it, it doesn’t really make any sense at all. It’s a great way to perpetuate inequality, especially wholly unearned inequality.

I’m not sure why the idea of perpetuating inequality “doesn’t make sense”. For most of human history that’s literally what civilization has been about: building on the efforts of your ancestors to be better than your neighbors, other tribes, and eventually other empire who would rather see you fail.

Note I am not arguing that inequality is an unvarnished good or that history isn’t filled with violence and sin. However, that’s a far cry from saying simply that “birthright” doesn’t make sense at least when talking about purely physical items to be inherited.

> However, that’s a far cry from saying simply that “birthright” doesn’t make sense at least when talking about purely physical items to be inherited.

Land in particular is a special case because more cannot be created (without absolutely massive capital projects and those require some special thinking, but they are outliers).

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progr...

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/does-georgism-work-is-...

I will agree that land is a special case, but that’s why we tax it continually.

I think society needs property tax to perform well, or else people will horde control of land under the mistaken belief that they can sell or rent it for high prices. You need tax to bring people back to reality and force them to use it productively in the present.

In the context of one society where some forms of wealth is claimed as "birthright" and thus perpetuating inequality is what does not make sense to me... meaning it is not fair.

There are multiple forms of birthright, too. The one we're used to is the right of aggregation -- I had one, inherited another, and now I have two.

Another form is the right of selection -- I have one, here's another one that just become unowned, and I get dibs on choosing that over my own. If I retain my own, the other lapses to the public. If I choose the other, mine does.

One could argue that it's "cosmically inherent" that something you earn through your own labor (of the body that you control/own?) should be yours do with as you please, so long as it doesn't hurt others. If you can't accept that fundamental property, we are quite frankly serfs, which is a few steps away from slaves. Slaves not only didn't own their own body, but they also didn't own the fruits of their labor.

> One could argue that it's "cosmically inherent" that something you earn through your own labor (of the body that you control/own?) should be yours do with as you please, so long as it doesn't hurt others.

Why is it only “cosmically inherent” as long as you don’t hurt others? Has the tiger no cosmically inherent right to his meal? The truth is he doesn’t, he must defend his kill if necessary.

The truth is you must defend what you’ve earned as well, either by force or through mutual agreement (society).

We, as a society, have agreed to grant each other exclusive rights to what we’ve earned. Of course that hasn’t always been the case throughout history. Don’t bring the cosmos into it, it happens through mutual consent, because we choose to.

Your rights are man-made, don’t take them for granted. They only exist so long as everyone agrees they do.

You can balance the real dual-interests at play here through progressive taxation, allowing for transfers of wealth that only marginally accelerate society-wide wealth disparity. The slaves/serfs lingo is a little stretched when it applies necessarily to other people, and those other people have had their entire lives to benefit from the wealth of the other person anyways.

> But when you examine it, it doesn’t really make any sense at all. It’s a great way to perpetuate inequality, especially wholly unearned inequality.

This paragraph doesn’t make any sense at all either.

The reason is that there is no meaning whatsoever to the concept of earned inequality, and therefore no meaning to the idea of ‘unearned’ inequality.

Are you saying it’s unfair to inherit something?

My situation is unique, and when I inherit it’s moral and just - my parents worked so hard, we earned this, it’s unfair to have so much tax.

When others inherit, society needs to take their wealth and redistribute it. Their situation is not like mine. These millionaires and billionaires got lucky and their kids don’t deserve to be rich for no reason.

Hard to tell if this is sarcasm.

Is it hard?

It's always hard, which is why sarcasm just isn't a good fit for text-only forums like HN. Too many of the cues that reveal sarcasm as sarcasm are lost.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

Of course it's unfair. It's the definition of unequal opportunity.

That doesn't necessarily mean it's immoral or should be illegal, but how could you argue that it's fair that some people get free money while others don't by the luck of their birth?

I work really hard so that I can give things to my children. They’re mine to give.

So did my parents. I'm going to be a father any day now, and you can be sure I'll do the same.

I don't see how it's "fair" that I was born to hardworking, financially responsible parents, while most others were less lucky though.

The same way it's fair when two people each buy a raffle ticket and one of them wins while the other doesn't?

That's not the same. Everyone can buy a raffle ticket, you can't randomly re-select your parents.

I don't get it, everyone can be born. Are you saying that it's the possibility of iteration that makes it fair? So if the raffle enforced one ticket per person it is no longer fair?

No, everyone is born, there is no choice about it. I can choose to partake in a raffle.

A forced raffle where everyone has to join is unfair, yes. That's why we have laws, and there is (ideally) no randomness.

Actually nobody selected their own parents or when and where they were born. That's a random selection that cannot be undone.

Hey, I didn’t catch word about the raffle until it ended and that’s not fair

That's still your fault, you could have read the newspaper in time to look for raffles.

My parents didn’t teach me to read. You have an unfair advantage.

while literacy is an advantage, its hardly unfair.

It‘s unfair to keep large amounts of generational wealth untaxed in the family while hard working people are taxed.

Two hard working people are born in poverty. They each work hard and reap the rewards of their success. They both pay income tax on their gains. One of the people spends their lifetime of accrued wealth on themselves, buying a nice car, a huge house, and luxury goods they don't really need. The other person is concerned about the future of their only child and lives well below their means, when they die they will their estate to their child who immediately stops working and never works again. Is that fair?

Now consider a third person who also cares for their child. This person also lives frugally but instead of saving their wealth every year they buy their kid fancy cars and luxury goods. They die penniless but their kid never had to work a day in their life. Is that fair?

It confuses work ethic with fairness. It works because we incorrectly associate good work ethic with positive outcomes. This is a particular to our current time and place in society and we should be very cautious when attempting to universalize it.

It would be good to reframe it with consequentialism in mind to reveal the unspoken truths of the examples.

> Two hard working people are born in poverty. They each work hard and reap the rewards of their success. They both pay income tax on their gains. One of the people spends their lifetime of accrued wealth on themselves, buying a nice car, a huge house, and luxury goods they don't really need. The other person is concerned about the future of their only child and lives well below their means, when they die they will their estate to their child who immediately stops working and never works again. Is that fair?

Ten generations later, the descendants of the first person have all been able to expand their wealth purely due to the wealth that their ancestor had. None of them have had to work hard for generations, but they all vigorously defend their right to give their wealth to their kids without taxes so that they also don't have to work hard. Meanwhile, the descendants of the second person are unable to acquire wealth due to the advantage that people like the first person have in controlling capital, and they all work menial jobs for people like the first person. Is that fair?

No, it isn’t fair but that can be avoided by adding friction to wealth via an annual wealth tax, and then only applying it on the largest (100m+) fortunes. I don’t think anyone thinks someone who works hard and saves shouldn’t be able to pass on a few million, or even tens of millions, to their descendant. But what you refer to is equally true - no one but the beneficiaries agree that someone should be born into monstrous wealth and be able to sustain generation after generation on the basis only of winning the ovarian lottery.

I, personally, would have a tax of 100% on all wealth over $100m.

I limited my hypotheticals to a single generation because I was interested in learning specifically what it is about inheritence that people find unfair.

Your response would seem to posit a different set of questions, namely should capital be used to make decisions for society and does a concentration of capital force those without to work a lifetime of menial jobs?

I'm less interested in addressing these questions since I've heard a lot about them before and I think it will take us on a further tangent from the original discussion. But I will just say that I see no difference between a first generation person who doesn't work and a tenth generation person who doesn't work beyond perhaps an abstract greater disconnection from the rest of society and the concept of hard working. And that for capital to have influence over society it must be deployed which carries with it the risk of losing said capital.

I'm not sure how you can separate the question about inheritance fairness from multiple generations other than in a very abstract sense because I think the unfairness is most often perceived with wealth that is so great that it will last beyond just the immediate heirs lifetimes. An inheritance of $10,000 is likely not going to last long enough to be passed on to one's own children, but an inheritance of hundreds of millions is presumably not going to be entirely used up in one generation.

Why does the number of generations that can free ride matter? If Warren Buffett can make 100 billion dollars in a single generation then he can skew society today. How would it be any different if he'd inherited it from his parents? Or his great great great to the nth grandparents? If there is a problem with concentrated wealth why is it more of a problem if it took a long time to accrue or to deplete or if it was accrued 200 years ago or this morning?

Let's say that there are three tables being used for playing Monopoly. Each of these games is played between a player designated A and a player designated B. At table 1, the game is played under standard rules. At table 2, the game is played with the standard rules, except at the end of the game, all of the money that the winning player has is given to player A in addition to their regular starting amount. At table 3, the same rules are played as at table 2, except that money is only passed on to player A in games where they did not start with additional extra money from the previous game.

Each table plays 10,000 games, and then the number of wins for each player are counted. Which table do you expect to have the greatest difference in the number of wins between players A and B, and which would you expect to have the least difference in wins between players A and B? I'd consider the table with the least expected difference of wins to be the most "fair", and the table with the greatest expected difference to be the least fair. My hypothesis is that table 1 would be the most fair, followed by table 3, and then table 2 would be the least fair.

Translating this to inheritance in the real world, I think being able to give an advantage to one's descendants for 10 generations is less fair than being able to give it to only one generation. In the context of something like an estate tax, I could imagine something like an implementation where accepting an inheritance incurs a higher tax rate on any money bequeathed up to the amount you inherited. For example, if I inherit $1,000,000 over my lifetime and then leave $5,000,000 to my heir, maybe the first $1,000,000 might incur an extra 10% tax, but then the remaining $4,000,000 is taxed at the regular rate. For something like this to be seriously implemented, I expect that it might need do account for more things (e.g. adjustment for inflation), but at least as far as I can see it seems like a pretty reasonable idea. It's possible that something like this already exists though!

Monopoly is an extremely crude model of the real world. To strain the analogy further, why are you always transferring wins to player A? A better model is to just let both players keep whatever they have at the end of each game and use it to start the next game. Oh, and also at the end of each game you die and are replaced with a completely different person.

But none of this matters because Monopoly is not real life.

The wealthy used to amass real physical resources; ores, livestock, land, people... Now we mostly have them chasing digital zeroes in a bank account. It really is much better. So some people buy a yacht every now and again? That's great! Yachtmakers have a reason to go to work every day and the world keeps spinning.

If you think there should be a cap on the total amount of zeroes anyone can hold at one time I totally get where you're coming from, but I don't get the obsession with taking a cut when someone dies beyond the normal cut we take when people just transfer wealth to eachother because a clever person will just make a plan to do this before they die and that is unfair to folks that aren't so clever.

> Monopoly is an extremely crude model of the real world.

Monopoly was just an example of a game with currency at the start; you could pick pretty much any other game with a similar mechanic.

> To strain the analogy further, why are you always transferring wins to player A? A better model is to just let both players keep whatever they have at the end of each game and use it to start the next game.

The reason I said to transfer to player A was merely to make it easier to express the inequality; think of player A not as a family line so much as "the set of people who have inheritances" versus "the set of people who don't". That's also why I don't think it matters whether the person is dead or not; my point is showing that having inheritance continue to affect games beyond the immediate one after is significantly different than limiting it to one generation.

> But none of this matters because Monopoly is not real life.

Yeah, I don't think anyone would disagree with this, but the point here is that having previous games affects later ones can give significant advantages and disadvantages, and this result is independent of the game.

> The wealthy used to amass real physical resources; ores, livestock, land, people... Now we mostly have them chasing digital zeroes in a bank account. It really is much better. So some people buy a yacht every now and again? That's great! Yachtmakers have a reason to go to work every day and the world keeps spinning.

I have no idea what this has to do with the discussion at all. Whether digital assets or physical ones are passed on via inheritance doesn't change whether or not starting with extra resources is an advantage or not. I definitely don't think that anyone is arguing that they think the problem with inheritance is that people can buy yachts?

> If you think there should be a cap on the total amount of zeroes anyone can hold at one time I totally get where you're coming from, but I don't get the obsession with taking a cut when someone dies beyond the normal cut we take when people just transfer wealth to eachother because a clever person will just make a plan to do this before they die and that is unfair to folks that aren't so clever.

We have taxes on people giving money to each other directly when alive as well. You can't just give someone $1 million while you're alive to avoid them having to pay taxes on it. If by "clever" you mean "avoiding taxes", then yes, I do think this also shouldn't be allowed, and I don't think I'd be opposed to having the tax rate be similar to the estate tax. From my perspective, the "obsession" is from people who seem to be from people _against_ allowing taxes on estates (using pejorative language like "death tax"[1] to try to derail the discussion). I don't feel the need to as strongly defend sales tax or income tax because there are far fewer people who argue that they shouldn't exist at all, but if the political will to abolish income tax reached similar levels of support to opposition to the estate tax, then I would focus more on it.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estate_tax_in_the_United_State...

It would take an extraordinary amount of discipline to maintain that wealth ten generations down the line. “Rags to rags in three generations” is a saying for a reason.

I think the answer is to treat capital gains and dividends the same as ordinary employment income and subject to the same tax rates. Perhaps introduce a sub-1% wealth tax per annum on very large fortunes (100m+) to add friction that the wealthy have to work to counteract.

*and to treat loans against capital assets as taxable income. Otherwise we’ll keep seeing the wealthy avoid taxation by loaning against their assets. So long as rates stay relatively low.

Maybe stop taxing any of it...

Parents payed taxes when they acquired their possessions. I dont see why they should have a double tax burden.

maybe the government should tax consumption instead of work or investment?

Most governments seem to tax all of these things.

It's obviously a nuanced discussion, but it's certainly a personal windfall to inherit land. It's hard to call it unfair, that's just life, but comparing one person who inherited land to someone who did not, it's clear who has the luckiest version of that scenario.

As long as there is sufficiently high property taxes that owners of land are forced to put it to societally useful purpose in order to pay the tax, I don’t see an issue with land inheritances. I don’t agree with “deemed disposition” tax rules that act as if the land was “sold” to the inheritor, triggering massive capital gains taxes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com