Unearned rents? Do you consider the salary you work for an unearned social benefit?
Nothing is unearned, except perhaps gov't welfare.
He said he'd give them a cut of the rent.
> How did your ancestor get to own the property in the first place?
So his parents earned it, not him.
Doing genealogy, one of the most interesting ancestors I have actually got mentioned in a discussion in parliament for his real estate shenanigans. His wife had inherited some small but vaguely defined land from her first husband. He then became mayor and land assessor, and drew up ridiculously generous borders (and low tax assessments) for that land. No one thought to stop him. At one point during a sale, some officials had commented that they couldn't find that he had title to this land, but they didn't follow up. By the time they complained about it in parliament, it was two generations and many land transfers ago so they didn't think it was worth it to try to unwind it.
Doesn't this mean that the problem is inheritance, not (only) land ownership? But I imagine taximg inheritance is very unpopular with everyone.
I am completely healthy while some are born into wheelchairs. I did not earn any of it.
You didn't answer the question.
Yes, but that does not need to be morals, values, ethics or ideology.
Instead I prefer Kant´s idea of the categorical imperative whereby the question only is if a society following specific rules would satisfy its members long term. It is more pragmatic as it shifts the question from should/shouldn't to does it work out.
you want a dictatorship? that's how you get a dictatorship.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-is-land-...
If they didn't want you to inherit them, presumably they would have done something about that.
Just admit that the world isn't fair and that some people are lucky and you don't live in a meritocracy, please.
Luck is part of part -- in economics we call it risk. And without risk there is no economic development.
Somebody in your past took a risk and passed profits from that risk down to you. Trying to take the ability to pass that down is both immoral and bad economics.
Like, if I found a tech startup that grows big in a small town, homes in that town will increase in value because people want to work at my company. The landowners did nothing for that value.
>Do you consider the salary you work for an unearned social benefit?
On the contrary, I consider the wages of labour and the return on capital to be the actual earned benefits. Yet these are the things we tax. So the wealthy claim no income, hold their assets, and never realize capital gains, and multinationals play accounting games and pretend that all of their profits happen in the lowest international tax jurisdiction. Sales taxes and personal income taxes end up being the majority of government revenue.
Land value taxes are much harder to avoid, they reward investment by not taxing it, and they promote efficient use of the land, which is the one thing that you need to do anything and the only thing that we can't get any more of.
After additional economic theory development, "People are said to seek rents when they try to obtain benefits for themselves through the political arena."
"But why do economists use the term “rent” [for a market benefit that is being sought outside the market mechanism]? Unfortunately, there is no good reason."
[all] https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentSeeking.html
Once those two terms are understandably conflated, and a commenter showed you their example of inheriting the right to some rental real estate, the terminological clarity in the discussion is more or less gone.