Every time that guy says "generational wealth" I throw up in my mouth a bit.
A side note: the fact that there are so many tech unicorns in the US is self-reinforcing, because the founders and early employees of IPO'd unicorns have usually invested their money into either their own venture or those of some random people they knew, and repeated the cycle. The rest of the world barely got anything from the insane valuation explosion in the tech sector of the last 15-20 years.
Yeah, a few of them are very high-profile in that [1], but they're a) an utter minority (there's ~3k of billionaires vs 236 that signed the Giving Pledge) and b) for most of them, even if they'd give away 90% of their wealth, their kids would still be effectively landed gentry. It's a sham to placate the masses.
Whereas this toady is so bent on having an overclass that he's doing that on behalf of others.
... and the pledge thing is the same, really. In order to have some hypocritical desire to signal adherence to some ideal, you first have to believe it's an ideal. Those people have no need to "placate the masses" in the sense of there being an imminent risk of torches and pitchforks. They're doing it at most for prestige... and prestige only counts if it's among people whose opinions you actually care about.
In your value system, is blowing it on yourself better?
EDIT: to be clear, the main point of generating wealth is to generate value for society. Society then pays you for that value with the wealth that you get... Now I am pointing out that on the personal level, helping your future generations is a totally admirable goal.
I don’t think you know what this means
Maybe? Like, certainly it's nice and good to pass along something to your children. But giving them the ability to just sit around and play video games every day for the rest of their life? What's good about that? (Yes, I know, many inheritors end up doing productive things with their money.)
I would advocate for dropping the inheritance tax exemption to something much much lower, and then taxing nearly all (or even all) of an inheritance above that amount.
As much as I am not a fan of Bill Gates, I 100% approve of his plan to earmark pretty much all of his wealth for philanthropy before he dies. I am still uncomfortable with the idea that we have to depend on the largess of a few billionaires in order to direct resources to make the world better. But I think that's massively better than passing on tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to offspring who didn't do anything to earn it.
> to be clear, the main point of generating wealth is to generate value for society. Society then pays you for that value with the wealth that you get...
That sounds like an overly idealized view of how things work. Many people get super rich for reasons that have little to do with generating wealth for society. And even if they do generate wealth for society, their reward is usually comically greater than the wealth they generate.
If you cap my ability to do that, that removes the main driver of my motivation.
Why allow kids to benefit from their parents at all? EG, why do immigrant kids get to benefit from their hardworking parens' ability to come to this country and build a life?
Perhaps a better question is to ask if great responsibility comes with great power. Because extreme wealth is great power. And money is not some mandate for power.
Living off inherited wealth isn't rent seeking; your dynasty doesn't need to collect any rents if you've left a large enough sum of money to them in a trust. They're living entirely off the money you earned fair and square.
And who actually makes that money? Those who pay rent, either in actual rent if you invested into real estate, or in one or another kind of fees, that you(r kids) can set (almost) at will.
Getting to that point where you are a rent seeker is the core issue at heart of SV-style capitalism. Use and burn enormous amounts of VC to destroy entrenched industry by price dumping (and in some cases like taxis, actually providing a better service), then either acquire or destroy your competition, and finally you have complete control over the market in a way that it would require enormous amounts of money to even be anything close to a threat to you (and at that point, you acquire them). Additionally, use the income from your market stranglehold to pivot into new ventures, because you can do so with ease. The best examples for how that played out are Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Google and, to a bit, Apple. Utterly dominant in their respective fields, and all at the control of one or more money spigots. And this is why these companies were and are valued at the valuations they have... investors assess companies on their chance of getting to such a dominant position, to then reap the benefits of the money spigot.
this gets really difficult when consdiering that the same unit of wealth also prices food, AND gambling