Comment by bloatisgood | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bloatisgood | Hacker News Reader

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How does receiving the assets of your parents after their death affect social mobility? By the time your parents die you are usually 50 years old which means your social environment is a far bigger factor. During the time the parents are alive the children benefit from their support directly, no inheritance needed. Even a 100% inheritance tax is not going to solve that.

What a lot of people seem to think is that an inheritance is undeserved because the person receiving it didn't do anything to earn it. Obviously the parents earned this through their income and decided to not spend everything and give what remained of their wealth to their children. Even if the parents merely received their wealth from another inheritance they still had to decide to not spend more than they add to the inheritance, otherwise it would dry up over multiple generations.

Why do we even care about billionaires anyway? Why should I care e.g. that Bill Gates' networth is $78 billion? Why not care about the people at the bottom? Why not give them the things they truly need like financial security instead of letting them worry that if they earn too much their income drops. Either you're poor and heavily depend on welfare or you earn enough to not need welfare in the first place. There is no middle ground and the gap between the two is very large.

The problem with inherited wealth in general is that you end up with aristocracies. I mean, that's literally how aristocracies formed in the first place. Wealth begets wealth, so the fixed point of a society without confiscatory inheritance tax is feudalism.

> Why do we even care about billionaires anyway?

For one thing, money is power. It's undemocratic to allow some people to be worth millions of times others. If you allow some individuals to become infinitely wealthy, they will eventually buy your political system and bend it to benefit them. In principle, that's bad. In practice, it's happened.

For another, the way the wealthy got rich constitutes a wholesale transfer of wealth from the nation. Bill Gates is a rich man because he benefited from government spending and welfare for the rich. Specifically from a form of welfare for the rich known as 'intellectual property law', which means people have to pay a large fee to Microsoft, enforced by the US government, to copy some 1's and 0's. He got rich from government spending on education, infrastructure and defense, which built a stable middle class that could buy computers. He also got rich from the defense and research spending that built the internet and gave the technology freely to the people. Finally, he got even richer from monopolistic anti-competitive behavior, and tax evasion which put Microsoft's tax address in Nevada, and from the political lobbying that allowed this theft to happen.

Bill Gates, like all billionaires, is a welfare queen, and the wealth he's sitting on should be returned to the nation he took it from.

> How does receiving the assets of your parents after their death affect social mobility

The article doesn't only address inheriting your parents' assets. It is also about people who inherit directly from grandparents and great grandparents. And actually it's even about people who grow up in families that have been wealthy for hundreds of years and remain so today and seem likely to remain so for hundreds of years more.

> undeserved

You seem to focus on whether it's fair that some people have unearned power, but another sense in which some people are concerned about undeserved inheritance is that there's no reason to think that those who win the Ovarian Lottery are particularly able to allocate society's resources. Those who have earned a fortune have demonstrated some ability to put resources to economically good effect, so there's a purely selfish & pragmatic reason to celebrate earned wealth that does not exist for unearned wealth.

>Obviously the parents earned this through their income

Largely parasitic income - rent, capital gains, interest on loans - things that don't actually require you to, y'know, work.

You can be brain damaged and still 'earn' these things.

>Why not care about the people at the bottom?

I guess you care about the people at the bottom by letting the parasites do their thing?

It depends if you think meritocracy is a good thing, as its basically the opposite of inheritance.

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