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Comment by hackula1 | Hacker News Reader

To say that the right want equal opportunity is dead wrong. Anyone who wants to do away with estate tax clearly has no care for equal opportunity. As I have said before, I would be a libertarian 100% if we could have a 100% estate tax and devote 100% of the proceeds to education. A true meritocracy (or as close as I think we could get). IMHO Conservatives would be against this because it would allow their kids to fail, and liberals would be against it because it would allow accountability for the the people coming from nothing.

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So I'm not American, and so have no idea what you're talking about. Estate tax seems to be something to do with taxing wills? Regardless, doing away with any kind of tax would be equal opportunity, because it's being gotten rid of for everyone. When I say equal opportunity I mean: "presume that everyone is exactly like me: how should I behave?". E.g., "Just because someone is poor doesn't mean they should be taxed less than me (or me more than them), we should be taxed the same".

hackula1 means this: If one child is born to the family of a billionaire, and another child is born to a poor unwed teen mother, then in what meaningful way can it be said that those two children have "equal opportunity"? Even if the billionare's child is a lazy fuckup, he/she still stands to inherit hundreds of millions of dollars and so will never have to want for anything. Even if the teenager's child works hard, without access to nurturing child care, education, books, etc., the odds are stacked against that child leading a happy and successful life, much less becoming a millionaire.

The only way to make it truly be the case that those two children succeed or fail in life due to their own qualities and choices -- "equal opportunity" -- would be to take the billionaire's money and spend it equally on nurturing and educating the two children. (In the US, the "estate tax" is a tax on inheritance, that is, it's our society deciding how good or bad it is if a child can inherit all or some of a parent's fortune.)

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